The Havoc side of the Force
by Tsu Doh Nimh
Summary: I have a singularly impressive talent for messing up the plans of very powerful people - both good and evil. Somehow, I'm always just in the right place at exactly the wrong time. What can I say? It's a gift.
1. Chapter 1

disclaimer=standard

Anything you recognise belongs to JK. Anything else probably belongs to her too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

**A series of excerpts from Master Alberto Literator's seminal work, Magnificent and Mighty Manual Manipulations of Magic.**

**From the Executive Summary:**

…_**Magical rituals are inherently dangerous and unstable exercises in direct, manual manipulation of magical energy. While spells and potions are limited by the skill of the caster or brewer, a well implemented magical ritual could theoretically, with the necessary materials, design and timing, accomplish almost anything…**_

**From Chapter 3 – A historical perspective on the development of Magical Rituals**

…_**Thoroughly documented examples in the public domain are rare, and are almost exclusively both benign and derived from publicly funded research. Individuals who invest the necessary (indeed, usually enormous amount of) resources into the research and development of new rituals are quite rightly reluctant to allow others to profit from their efforts. As such, the prescribed methods, materials, processes and spells are generally regarded as family (or less often, as trade) secrets. It is not uncommon for experienced ritual crafters to 'accidentally' release misinformation regarding their creations, leading to serious injury or death for the unwary…**_

**From Chapter 7 – Common aspects of all Magical Rituals**

…_**The sheer density of magical power contained within a ritual often dwarfs the yearly magical expenditure of a typical magical community...**_

**From Chapter 12 – Safety (expunged from the published version)**

_**...Magical rituals, as a rule, should not be interrupted.**_

_**At least, not by those who prefer living…**_

**Chapter 1**

My efforts in studying magical theory have historically - not to mention infamously - been rather poor. During my years of formal education at Hogwarts, I was always far more successful with the practical application of magic rather than the theoretical. I could demonstrate the slight variations on the standard wand movements that enabled a caster to eke out a little more power from a spell, but I couldn't tell you why those very same movements worked better.

While I must take the majority of the blame for this state of affairs, at least a small part of the blame lies with my friends.

One of my best friends was always more interested in coasting through school. He unconsciously trusted that the inherent knowledge obtained from being raised in a purely magical environment would stand him in good stead around exam time. From his influence, I developed poor discipline in my study habits that was distinctly difficult to overcome as I grew older.

Another of my friends was so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that it was a wonder there wasn't some sort of explosion whenever they happened to be in the same room. She would urge, cajole, beg, plead, bribe and even, on one memorable occasion, blackmail me into working hard enough to get far better grades than I deserved. While I will be forever grateful for her foresight, her prodigious abilities allowed me to develop another fundamentally poor study habit. The habit of dependence. For years, whenever I was presented with a problem (schoolwork or otherwise) with no clear solution, I would rely on her to assist me, rather than try to work the solution out for myself. On the few occasions she declined her assistance, my sulking invariably tainted any solution I came up with.

To the surprise of many, including myself, I finally began studying in earnest after my formal education had ended. Once I had a goal in life beyond merely surviving to adulthood, I found that learning about magic was actually enjoyable. Enchanting, as it were. Much of my studying since the end of my Hogwarts career has been around the darker aspects of magic, and how to counteract it. That knowledge enables me to make a positive impact on the world.

Well, that's not quite correct. It would be more accurate to say that I remove some of the many negative impacts on the world. More specifically, I remove the negative impacts also known as dark wizards.

Now, I don't go out and simply kill those who delve deeper than is acceptable into the darker aspects of magic. Well all right, I do. Occasionally. But only if it's necessary. Riddle Junior, for instance. It was necessary for me to kill him. Fate you see. People who actively try to deny their destiny tend to end up reinforcing it. A lesson my nemesis learned first hand.

Honestly, using a Killing Curse on a toddler? He was overcompensating for something, I'm sure.

But, as I said, I don't go around indiscriminately butchering those who prefer curses and hexes to jinxes and charms. It is far more effective to negate the power and influence of dangerous magic users. After all, there was a big difference between someone dangerous, like Lucius Malfoy, and someone less so, like Marvolo Gaunt.

Both wizards were inordinately proud of the fact that they had individuals making appearances on both sides of their family tree. Both were sociopaths who thought that Muggles were a blight upon the earth. And both had, at best, average magical skill.

But the Malfoys (or rather, the Malfoy _name_) had money and influence behind it. The Gaunts did not.

So, rather than chlorinating the magical gene pool, I remove the negative impacts on society by depriving these bastards of the source of their power. Officially, I'm employed by various ICW members as a consultant to assist them with internal problems stemming from various dark magic users.

But when you say, 'Officially', there is always a corresponding, 'Unofficially', isn't there?

Despite my new-found enjoyment of learning, my more recent studies are stunted by the fact that I rarely get the chance to actually sit down to study. That is to say, I rarely get the chance to sit down to study _uninterrupted_. And almost without exception, these interruptions all boil down to one single fact.

I am the Master of Death.

Being the owner of all three Deathly Hallows should, in theory, be quite liberating. And it's not bad at all, if I'm completely honest. It's just that, well, it would be so much better if nobody actually knew. In the six years since becoming the Master of the Hallows, I have been obliged to prove, on all too many occasions, that my exam scores at Hogwarts were no indication of my practical magical skill. I have had to fend off attempts (ranging from clumsy to deadly) on my life and wand a couple of times a month. Yes, it gives my life a certain zest, but my 'official' work through the ICW already generates more than enough interest for any not-entirely-sane wizard, thank you very much.

I occasionally find myself wondering if the positives from possessing the Hallows still outweigh the negatives.

The list of benefits is extensive, I will quite happily admit. During the course of many of my gigs, I have all too often found it difficult to convince recalcitrant witches and wizards to reveal information they'd prefer to keep to themselves. One of my natural talents, as Dumbledore himself noted, is the ability to ferret out secrets. Quite often I somehow manage to end up exactly where I need to be to discover what I need to know; a trait that annoys so many people that even Snape would be hard pressed to register in the top quarter of the list. However, it is almost always _faster_ to get the info directly, rather than spend time and effort to discover it surreptitiously.

Other 'governmental consultants' have to take care not to accidentally kill these potential sources of information, while those very same sources are not labouring under reciprocal conditions. This fact makes the truly successful members of my profession very rare. Those who can protect themselves but not keep their information sources alive don't tend to be as successful in their missions. Those who cannot protect themselves while keeping their targets alive usually don't complete their first.

Not me. I'll always do everything practicable to keep the body count as low as possible, unless of course I'm being paid a hefty premium to ensure that my target is never a direct danger ever again. But I possess a ring that allows me to question even those inclined to the suicidal. Dead men do in fact tell tales. To me.

I sort of fell into the contracting game. There wasn't an advertisement in the Prophet or anything like that. After I'd turned Riddle into a country-wide, week-long hangover, the Ministry of Magic had so few trained Aurors left that they could barely keep the Statute of Secrecy in place. The Ministry offered me a position in their ranks despite the fact that I hadn't even sat my NEWTs. I probably would have accepted it too and happily sauntered down a life path that included a red-headed wife, two point five children and a house with a white picket fence, if it hadn't been for one thing.

The idiots in charge decided to risk another Goblin Rebellion™ by claiming as much gold as they could from the vaults belonging to recently extinct family lines. The money pilfered was used to establish a fund from which sizable bounties were offered for each follower of Voldemort captured.

At that point, the only real problem I had was the fact that the offer came into existence after I'd killed the Head Honcho. The decision that changed my life was the Wizengamot shutting down magical border control. They hoped that the surviving members of Team Loser would just take a permanent (or at least, an extended) vacation abroad in less inhospitable climes, out of their jurisdiction and thus, out of their hair.

That decision - and subsequent action - pissed off a lot of people. But the majority of the wizarding world couldn't be more easily led even with rings bolted through their collective noses. They complained for a day or two and then went back about their business.

I however, did not. A few close friends of mine were, due in no small part to their prior association with me, also prepared to join in taking direct action against two (somewhat overlapping) groups of idiots.

Group A consisted of the remaining slaves of a recently deceased, unmourned, insane megalomaniac. Whether branded or not. In an effort induce fear rather than ridicule, they had called themselves Death Eaters. In my opinion, that was a strong medal contender in the "Most Stupidly Named Terrorist Group Ever" Olympics.

That is, until I discovered something that made me slap my forehead and wonder why everyone was so frightened of them. Apparently, back in the days when they first pulled on the bone mask and went Muggle hunting, they originally went by the name "The Knights of Walpurgis".

It was at that point I decided that, as a group, Death Eaters had fewer creative talents than a baboon with a handful of its own feces. And that they were in desperate need of a decent Public Relations firm.

Despite the Ministry's best efforts to enable, if not allow it, I was not going to let the sociopathic bastards get away again. Many of the survivors actually thought that they'd be able to lay low for a spell, and then pop up and dust off the old, "Honest guv, I was under the Imperius" defence. They'd drop a few galleons in some pockets, and go about their business. Neville, Ron and I spent some time under WWW-brand Polyjuice courtesy of George. We convinced a few ringleaders to organise the rest to meet up, by convincing them that they needed to get their stories straight.

The three of us then crashed every one of these gatherings, and bankrupted the recently-established bounty fund. In the first week of the offer alone, we rounded up three groups of a dozen or more Death Eaters.

Group B was of course, the Wizengamot. Not the Ministry of Magic, despite the dubious habit of people using the terms interchangeably. The Ministry was full of civil servants who were, for the most part, just trying to make a living wage writing reports on cauldron bottoms. It was the legislative/judicial branch, aka the Wizengamot, that dropped the proverbial ball. They were desperate to make the remaining Death Eaters at large someone else's problem. A number of members also didn't want any of their dealings or support entered into the public record.

So Ron and I came up with a little friendly competition to determine the best way to hit the pocketbooks of both sets of idiots.

Ron's idea involved double-dipping. If we were on the trail of a wealthy Death Eater, I'd stay under my cloak as backup while Ron made the take. With Ron's family's financial woes well known, more often than not he'd be offered a bribe to let the poor (that is to say, unfortunate) Death Eater go. Since the bounties for both marked and unmarked Death Eaters were in the five figure range, the bribes on offer were pretty substantial, even from my trust-fund-baby perspective. I'd drop a couple of trackers on the target while the stacks of coins changed hands. Once the target had buggered off, Ron would hide under the cloak, and we'd drop on the Death Eater again for the bounty less than a minute later.

This tactic induced the sort of annoyance in a lot of people that was usually associated with burst aneurysms.

I'm not sure which was more satisfying; the looks on their faces or the lovely clinking sound your enemy's gold makes when it lands in your vault. It's a tough call.

My brainwave (while more actual work) was far more financially successful. Ron and I set ourselves up as 'Anonymous Azkaban Extraction Consultants'. We'd make secret, unsolicited approaches to the families of those unfortunate, misunderstood, hardworking and honest Death Eaters, offering to break them out of prison - so long as the aforesaid families could afford our fees.

Said fees were on an obscure and complex sliding scale, based on what the families could pay – ranging from flippin' expensive through overly exorbitant all the way up to 'hock the mansion and rummage for change down the back of the sofa. Oh, and that sofa looks comfy, so we'll have that too'.

Once the gold was in our 'company' vault, Ron & I would spring them from prison; a process made much easier by a combination of the island's low Dementor population and rushed Auror training. Part of our Extraction Service included a Fidelius-hidden bolt hole, where we'd insist the ex-prisoners reside for a while 'until the heat died down'. Over the next few days, we'd add a few paranoia-inducing potions to their food. This guaranteed that despite their relative safety in their hidden (yet well bugged) location, they'd try to run sooner rather than later. We'd simply follow along. One quick pick up later and Ron and I would have another bribe and another bounty. Occasionally, we'd get a bonus for quietly retrieving an escapee without letting the media find out.

Our prices were so obscene that Lucius actually had to sell Malfoy Manor and its surrounding lands to pay for his and Draco's third Azkaban Extraction. The blond ponces only twigged to the fact that they were being played when the Prophet ran a story about Ron moving his entire extended family (which is pretty much the textbook definition of the term 'extended') into the old Malfoy ancestral home.

Draco's expression on hearing the news was a classic. That memory has been fuelling my Patronus ever since.

Soon, the Death Eaters discovered that, to their abject horror, no one was interested in associating with them anymore. It wasn't their family name, or pure blood status, or history that had attracted sycophants. It was the gold.

In all truth, I was surprised that they were... well... surprised. Hell, the Weasleys were a classic case in point. The Malfoys or Parkinsons are barely fertile, pureblood families that produce pathetic scions like Draco and Pansy - powerful, but only because of their wealth. The Weasleys are a pureblood family that pumps out powerful magical babies by the proverbial truckload, but they are dirt poor - a laughing stock.

Well, they used to be poor; the current generation has changed that.

Eventually, most of Voldie's old buddies were too broke to offer a bribe or pay us to get them out of prison. With about two thirds of the wizarding world's dark money out of the hands of the old families, Neville had the ready cash to fund a couple of impressive election campaigns for himself and Hermione, and none of their potential opponents had the ability to fund a counter-campaign. The pair even set a couple of records on their appointment to that body; the youngest ever member and the first Muggle-born member respectively. With the backing of all that gold, they managed to influence (read: bribe) a sizable voting bloc in the Wizengamot and began a series of reforms that caused pure-blooded shrieks of anguish audible from almost any part of the country.

Such indicators suggest that they are doing quite well for themselves.

Ron decided he had enough gold and quit the contracting game. Flush with dirty cash, he bought himself a seat on the board of his beloved Cannons. The money didn't help them win any games however. It is entirely possible that a powerful witch or wizard put a curse on them in decades past, sort of like the Defense position at Hogwarts. Despite the Cannon's continued lack of success, Ron was obscenely pleased with himself. The fact that he spent a lot of his spare time in his vault acting like Scrooge McDuck may have been a contributing factor. Once he learned to spell the coins soft after the first, memorable incident. Gold is *hard* when you land on it.

As for me? I'd come to the conclusion that the Wizarding World could go hang. I had _literally _given my life for them, only to be betrayed time and again. I was not about to take the standing offer to enter the Auror corps, even assuming I could get a handle on the whole obeying authority concept. I'd been well and truly cured of my 'saving people' habit, at least as it pertained to the Wizarding World at large.

If I was going to be pressed into service, I was damn well going to be _paid_.

Plus, I was hooked on the adrenaline rush.

I got a lot of kit custom made for the stated purpose of taking dark wizards down, and spent quite a bit of time studying magic that had passed me by at Hogwarts. With a reputation for successfully capturing extremely powerful people and a wand that makes any spell I cast stupidly overpowered, I began receiving dossiers on "person or persons of interest" from other countries. And occasionally from other governments too.

But 'catching' wasn't the primary reason I got my custom gear made. Sure, putting a dark wizard behind bars was the popular thing, but it didn't fix the underlying problem. These bastards were wealthy, or they had wealthy patrons. I reasoned that I would have far more long-term success at keeping dark wizards down by appropriating their resources. If someone had managed to bankrupt the Malfoy family sometime after the Halloween of '81, Voldemort's return after the Tournament would not have been so devastating.

So, I've got a kick-arse invisibility cloak, a ring that allows me to question dead people, and a wand that craps all over Olivander's best. They're combined with basilisk-hide clothes and about three-quarters of Borgin & Burkes' inventory shrunken down in various pockets, liberated before the shop mysteriously burned to the ground. With my history of attempting insane manoeuvres (and not just on a broom), they make me uniquely suited to publicly be a bounty hunter. A _very, very expensive _bounty hunter.

But oddly enough, it also makes me a damned fine thief.

I've nicked half the contraband in Knockturn Alley. Some of the vendors there have had to get legitimate part time jobs to make ends meet. The Department of Mysteries are still looking for several dozen unique volumes that disappeared from their 'forbidden library'. The Malfoys were decidedly pissed when they discovered everything missing from their drawing-room hiding place. Hell, I've broken into and out of Gringotts three times since the infamous Dragon-Ride-Over-London incident, and the goblins still don't have any idea why a handful of vaults belonging to powerful arseholes are short several of metric tonnes of gold.

(I'd have loved to have been listening through an extendable ear when the goblins explained to Madam Roysten that she couldn't afford the bribes she was paying out. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to the meeting. I was busy, toasting her new-found poverty. With the contents of her own wine cellar.)

Yes, I'm a criminal.

And I'm no Robin Hood. Keeping up with modern advances in security is quite expensive. Muggle advances at least. The last magical advance not invented by WWW was probably the upgrade in travel technology known as the Hogwarts Express.

Despite the advantages I have, there are times that I do regret my poor study habits. Were I even able to learn, remember and plan a quarter as well as my studious school friend, I'd not find myself caught up in the most inconvenient situations.

Like the one today.

_Chapter 2_

_It had taken me nine long weeks to track down my target. I only managed to catch up to her after following her blood-stained, corpse-littered trail through Paris, Berlin, Osaka, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Singapore, Rome and back through Paris again. Ironically, I was only a few hundred miles away from the starting point of my journey. I felt a bit like Filius Fogg._

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: Believe it or not, the Death Eaters _**were** _originally called the Knights of Walpurgis.

_Source of information: BBC Newsnight Thursday, 19 June, 2003, 19:05 GMT 20:05 UK  
Transcript of JK Rowling: The Interview  
__"'...in here is the history of the Death Eaters and I don't know that I'll ever actually need it - but at some point - which were once called something different - they were called the **Knights of Walpurgis**...'"_ - J.K. Rowling.


	2. Chapter 2

disclaimer=standard

Anything you recognise belongs to JK or George. Anything else probably belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

_Previously:_

_Despite the advantages I have, there are times that I do regret my poor study habits. Were I even able to learn, remember and plan a quarter as well as my studious school friend, I'd not find myself caught up in the most inconvenient situations._

_Like the one today._

**Chapter 2**

It had taken me nine long weeks to track down my target. I only managed to catch up to her after following her blood-stained, corpse-littered trail through Paris, Berlin, Osaka, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Singapore, Rome and back through Paris again. Ironically, I was only a few hundred miles away from the starting point of my journey. I felt a bit like Filius Fogg.

Fifty yards away stood the most dangerous witch in Britain, with the exception of an enraged Molly Weasley. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, as it actually was an enraged Molly Weasley who first took the bitch down. Unfortunately, Bellatrix had followed closely to her master's footsteps, and had created her own horcrux. I'd found and destroyed it years ago (for some reason, splitting your soul seems to screw the part of your brain that calculates risk. Both Tommy Junior and Bellatrix were skilled magic wielders, but Crabbe and Goyle could have picked better hiding places.)

Unfortunately, I destroyed her soul anchor a week after she'd possessed another witch. Too late to prevent her 'resurrection'.

That possession had worked rather better than Quirrell-mort. The pair had fused together almost seamlessly.

I can't imagine that Bellatrix chose Millicent Bulstrode for aesthetic reasons. But my old classmate was physically imposing; and with a witch of Bellatrix's skill commanding the magic, she was a formidable foe.

Even so, I doubted that she could take me on in a straight up fight. As powerful as she was, I had too many advantages. It was her thirteen allies that gave me pause. I'd sent a Patronus to the Aurors for assistance. Knowing their usual response time, I'd best get comfortable.

As I observed Bella-cint (or Milli-trix?), I absently let my wand fall from its wrist holster into my waiting hand, before silently willing it to return. It was a habit I'd developed while on my stakeouts; I didn't even think about it now. It was a silent habit; one I had no pressing need to break.

Despite crouching in a bunch of dew-dappled heather, shivering in the frigid breeze and covered in mud, I decided then and there that I loved Scotland. When you spend the happiest times of your childhood almost exclusively in one place, you tend to develop a certain fondness. Sure, the weather could be better. And the regional dialects can be a mite difficult to comprehend with an untrained ear. And don't get me started on the local gastronomic preferences. But the country is absolutely sodding beautiful; some parts wild and untamed, others sedate and calm. It is an intensely magical place, with leys spread all over the landscape like a London roadmap. There are stone circles _everywhere_; erected back when local shamans needed all the help they could get in their constant wars with every other neighbouring shaman. Even Hogwarts has a couple of simple nine-point stone circles; set up for NEWT level Arithmancy and Runes students to run their homework projects on.

The stone circle in front of me was one of only a handful that still sat at the intersection of a pair of primary leys, or what muggles call ley lines. It's these lines of power that boost the output of rituals performed in a circle. Unfortunately, they aren't permanent. Geological changes anywhere in the world can and do change the path and strength of the leys, which in turn can seriously screw with a circle's potential amplification.

One druidic coven a while back spent a couple of million man-hours quarrying, transporting, carving, erecting and aligning a massive stone circle at an unprecedented six-way junction of primary leys on the Salisbury Plain. They got exactly one solstice ritual out of it before an earthquake off the coast of Iceland turned the spot into a literal dead-magic zone. Now it's a muggle tourist trap and the punch line of wizarding jokes all over the world. A significant fraction of the crowd watching muggles dress up as druids and act out the winter solstice sunrise ritual are magical folk there to laugh themselves stupid at the sight.

Now, I know what a real magical ritual looks like.

Admittedly, my knowledge comes from muggle literature and movies rather than magical textbooks. I didn't do Arithmancy at Hogwarts, and my Ancient Runes expertise comes from spending some of my free time picking up pointers from a trio of insane Gringotts Curse Breakers. But to my mind, anyone, with or without a magical education, would be able to deduce that fourteen chanting people positioned around a Scottish stone circle painted with a veritable abattoir's worth of spilled entrails did not suggest something positive.

I know what a magical ritual does.

Well, that's not quite accurate. I know how powerful magical rituals can be. The rituals themselves can accomplish almost anything; they just need the right materials, circle design and spell-work. Given that the number of benign rituals that require blood is pretty small, I really didn't want to see the ritual in front of me succeed.

I knew that it had to be stopped.

Unfortunately, when the ritual reaches the point where the chanting volume and tempo become loud and fast respectively, there isn't a great deal of time left to wait for backup to arrive. You don't even have time to leaf through old textbooks for answers on stopping it safely. The ability to speed read can only help so much.

Now, I'm sure that the ritual could probably have been nullified by having seven naked virgins recite the Lord's Prayer in three-part harmony, or something similarly ridiculous. The problem was the sudden appearance of a horrible looking tear in the fabric of reality in the centre of the circle.

The birth of a purple-edged tesseract however meant the time for research and planning was about a month or two back. And let's face it, even if I had the requisite number of virgins on hand, they'd probably have taken one look at the vision of hell beyond the vortex, given up, and started looking for someone to remove their qualification for shutting down the ritual in the first place before the entire world blew up.

Sod it; I was put in Gryffindor for a reason.

Despite their power, or perhaps because of it, rituals are pretty fragile things. Especially once the number of participants gets above seven or so. The more power running through the circle, the more people you need to channel it. I figured that since Bellatrix was standing in the middle of the circle just next to the gaping portal, it was a reasonable bet that I could enter the circle without being turned into a pile of goo. I rose from my position of cover amid the damp heather and made a dash for it.

Even with the Elder Wand in hand, I wasn't going to get into a battle with fourteen magic users. My highest probability for success was to snatch Bellatrix from the middle of the ritual without being seen. Let the rest of the buggers deal with the uncontrolled dimensional rift.

The thirteen witches and wizard that made up the perimeter of the circle didn't notice my disillusioned form. I passed between two at a dead run, only to feel the circle's threshold shatter. It felt like I'd just belly-flopped into a pool of molasses. I was still running, but through a magical field thick enough to make it look as though I was moving in slow motion. The rip caused by my passing flared into a cascading backlash that arced its way around the circumference of the stone circle, flooding each chanting wizard with enough raw power to cause their bodies to explode in showers of gore. With the possible exception of the pair I'd run between, I don't think any of them had any inkling of the danger before they painted the Scottish countryside with their intestines.

Getting hit by the odd human rib was not originally on my list of things to do today, but sometimes you just have to take whatever the universe decides to throw your way.

The fact that a baker's dozen worth of people assisting the Death Eater had just shuffled violently off the mortal coil did not bother me. Not when I was now running in slow motion through the middle of a collapsing magical ritual.

Ah well, this course of action was not so much a good idea as a necessary one.

Bellatrix, who up until a few seconds ago had presumably hoped to use the tear between dimensions to gather a substantial amount of magical power, screamed as the polluted energies thundered around us. Despite her rage and agony, she showed considerable presence of mind and pulled out a golden pendant on a chain. With trembling hands, she began turning a tiny gear.

I swore as I recognised the time-turner. I was not going to be left behind, holding the metaphorical bag. I lunged through the thick air, hands outstretched. I grabbed a hold of the dark witch's hair and screamed my emergency portkey's activation phrase just as the circle flashed a brilliant white.

The last thing I thought as the ritual's containment failed was, _this is going to hurt_.

The stones in the circle shattered.

My portkey pulled.

The time-turner turned.

The magic split the world.

* * *

After an eternal instant of both nothing and everything, my first conscious thought was, _I was right_.

Anyone who's been the unfortunate recipient of a Cruciatus Curse from someone of, say, Tom Riddle Junior's skill, knows a bit about pain. More than a bit in fact.

This pain wasn't anywhere near that level, but it still felt like someone had spent a few minutes whacking me all over with a golf club, before taking a cricket bat to my gonads. I really felt a desperate need to curl up and suffer in silence, but my burning lungs insisted that I do something about the fact that my head was under water.

I arched my back and broke the surface, gulping in a deep breath of sweet, sweet air. Lungs temporarily sated, my testes reasserted their prior claim. I curled up under the water again and let out a scream. Bubbles filled with the sound of my agony caressed my cheeks as they rose to the surface of the water.

Once I'd emptied my lungs, I again pulled my head out of the water, thrashing through the pain with my arms to locate something to grab on to. My questing hands found a stone ledge, which I gripped tightly before noting a couple of things that had escaped me for the past few pain-filled moments.

One, the water was only waist deep. I'd been thrashing about in a pond I could easily stand in, had it not been for my aching nuts.

And two, I had an audience.

At least thirty people were arrayed around me, some apparently unconscious on the hard stone floor, most watching me with almost identical expressions of shock. Normally in a muggle setting, my dark cloak and grey-green basilisk-hide clothing looked as out of place as a nudist at a papal coronation. I had imbued the cloak with my own customised variant of the Notice-Me-Not charm to help overcome that. But I wasn't all that dissimilarly dressed as my audience. From pre-school children to blue-veined ancients, all wore sandy robes over tunics and trousers. As my eyes flicked over them, scanning for threats, I noticed that they weren't all human.

And not just not-human. Some weren't even humanoid.

Still, I had a centaur for a professor for part of my fifth year; I could keep a straight face when looking at… at a face with three eye-tipped tentacles.

Focus, Potter!

With the painful throbbing slowly fading, I placed both palms on the ledge and hauled my sodden body out of the fountain. I swung my legs out of the water and onto the tiled floor. I stood, but it was too soon. The world tilted and I fell, hitting the side of my head on the ledge. Pinpricks of light swirled in my vision. On that basis, I decided to delay standing for a moment. I pushed myself into a crawling position, still trembling from the memory of that pain. I touched the side of my head, noting that my fingers came away tinged red with diluted blood.

Since I was more or less relegated to being on my hands and knees until the spinning stopped, I settled on a breathing exercise I'd learned in Japan to help focus the mind. Several figures trotted closer, babbling in a language I'd never heard before.

I slowly pushed myself upright, until I was standing on my knees. My mind became more capable of processing the situation. Time to gather some more information.

"Where am I?" I asked.

My question seemed to stump them. I watched as nearly all the conscious people in the room shared baffled glances with each other.

"Does anyone speak English? No? Er, Français? No? Deutsch? Er, Nihongo?"

Not a one of them, apparently. In all honesty, I'm capable of asking for little more than a cup of tea and directions to the nearest loo in the last three. There's only so much you can learn from thirty seconds with a phrase book. But it's amazing how many problems seem less insurmountable with an empty bladder and a hot cuppa.

A tall chap with grey skin and short horns sprouting in various directions all around his face stepped forward, pulling a white cloth from his robe. He offered it to me, pointing to the side of my head. He spoke, but I couldn't understand a single syllable. "_Do you speak Basic_?"

I shrugged and accepted the offering, placing it over my wound. None of the figures seemed hostile. Or even aggressive. They mostly seemed… curious, though a couple of the smaller kids were half-hiding behind an adult. The horny chap spoke again in that odd language, but over his shoulder. "_Please fetch a protocol droid, youngling_." A short figure ran out a nearby doorway.

As the fog in my mind faded, I noticed that several of the younger-looking members of my audience were tending to the prostrate figures. I felt a sensation of déjà vu; I just knew that I was going to be blamed for all this.

I rose to my feet, forcing my body to obey. I was mostly successful, swaying only slightly. Grey hands gripped my shoulders, supporting without restraining.

"I should go," I said, looking for an exit, and picking one that the child hadn't disappeared through. Reinforcements were probably going to come from that direction. "Excuse me," I offered, trying to disentangle myself.

"_You should rest, you are injured_," the alien said, his tone of voice soft and comforting.

I gently but firmly removed the being's hands from my shoulders. "Excuse me," I repeated, a bit more forcefully. I don't know why I was being polite. I could have been swearing at them like a pirate for all they understood me.

Oddly, the fellow with the horns didn't make a further move to physically restrain me; he simply held up his hands and muttered something else I didn't hear and wouldn't understand if I had. I took three steps towards the nearest door when a clanking noise drew my attention.

I think my jaw dropped open. A bloody _robot_ walked through the other door, escorted by a humanoid child with orange skin and what looked like coloured bone plates framing her face. Where the hell was I?

_When_ the hell was I?

The robot was built along human lines, with a familiar number of heads, limbs and eyes, but there was no nose and its mouth was simply a small, immovable slot. The arms looked to be bent at a fixed angle, and the shuffling gait of short, rapid steps looked almost comical. It strode up to me and gave a small bow.

"_Greetings, I am See Five Are Eight Two, human cyborg relations_."

I blinked. The bloody thing talked. I didn't understand it any more than the horned chap, but still, the robot sounded… alive.

"_He doesn't appear to speak Basic_," Horny spoke to the robot.

This caused the robot to start speaking all sorts of wildly different languages. Some were barked, some were whistled, and a few even sounded like they were made of music. But I couldn't understand a single one.

I shook my head. "Sorry, I don't understand. Do you speak English?"

The robot paused, tilted its head to one side, and tapped its chest with one, er, hand. "See Five Are Eight Two," it said slowly.

I swallowed, and tapped my chest. "Er, Harry."

The robot gave another small bow. "Er Harry."

I sighed and shook my head. "Just Harry." My eyes flickered around the large room. "Where am I?" I asked.

The robot lazily waved a permanently bent arm around in a wide arc. "_Jedi Temple, _Harry."

Okay, this was getting surreal. My ears were still ringing from the blow to my temple and I could feel the blood pounding in my head. The pain in my nuts was still there, and I was surrounded by what looked like the results of the Department of Mysteries' experiments.

The robot said something else to me, but I couldn't focus. This was all wrong. I shouldn't be here. I needed to get out!

I waved my hand absently, and pushed my way towards the doorway. A few individuals followed, babbling in their language at me. Even the rapid, small-stepped, mechanical clanking of the robot followed along, comically trying to keep up.

Unthinkingly, I broke into a slow, staggering run.

The massive arched windows along the corridor let in massive amounts of light, but they were set high up on the walls, preventing me from seeing out. I found myself squinting, half covering my eyes with my forearm. I would have tried apparating, except that in my current condition I'd no doubt end up in St. Mungo's as a splinching victim.

I almost fell over a couple of times as I ran. Dizzy spells washed over me, but I kept on going.

I don't know how long I ran through the building; no one tried to stop me, but they sure as hell stopped and stared. Eventually, I found myself in a massive hallway, with thick stone pillars supporting an arched roof. Open doors at the far end let in so much light I was momentarily blinded. It looked like the entrance to paradise.

I staggered through those enormous doors, finding myself not in heaven, but at the top of a huge flight of stone stairs. The sky was bright with glare, so I covered my eyes with my arm and stared down at my feet. I descended the long staircase into a densely populated plaza. My eyes grew accustomed to the light, and I dropped my arm. I clutched my cloak around me even more tightly, my mind awhirl.

Was this happening? Had I been drugged? I turned to look at the building I'd exited.

It was sodding _huge_. I couldn't grasp the dimensions at first. The stone steps that had seemed to go on forever were tiny compared to the building's sheer scale. It loomed out of the ground like an edifice to the ultimate religion. It looked to be a cross between a cube and a pyramid, with acutely sloping sides that reached into the sky, suddenly truncated. Out of the top rose some towers, each taller than the tallest building I'd ever seen.

Such engineering feats did little to calm my scattered mind.

I moved away from the building, almost running, searching for something - anything - familiar. I passed people, robots and aliens alike; seeing, but not registering. My vision doubled for brief periods, but always returned to focus. There was still nothing that looked like home.

I don't know how long I wandered. The continuing dizzy spells stopped me briefly in my tracks, but once they passed, I continued on my futile quest. I couldn't read anything, it was all hieroglyphs. I couldn't speak with anyone; all I got were puzzled expressions.

I bumped into a figure, bouncing off his bulk. A face out of a horror movie regarded me. I'd have kept going, but the alien pointing at my head and spoke some indecipherable words.

I shook my head. He tapped the side of his own face and asked something again.

Involuntarily, I raised a hand and touched my face. A piercing pain accompanied the touch. Rather than the clear sweat I'd expected, my fingers came away crimson. I was still bleeding.

Maybe my little bump on the head wasn't so little after all? Was all this a hallucination brought on by head trauma?

Well, time spent with Madam Pomfrey had taught me a lot about being prepared for healing. As I turned and stumbled away, moving almost on its own volition, my left hand dropped to my belt. I eased a vial out of its sheath and lifted it to my lips.

This specific healing draught was directed at head wounds, aiding in the recovery from concussions and other skull trauma. As usual, the taste made me shudder. But the concussive fog that surrounded my thoughts burned away, leaving me clear-headed for the first time in what felt like a century.

Unfortunately, the scene before me did not change.

I took a deep breath. I noted smells both familiar and alien. With clearer thoughts and sharper vision, I examined my surroundings, looking for safe havens, exits and threats. I wiped the blood away from my temple with a handkerchief still damp from my earlier dunking.

I needed somewhere I could sit and think; somewhere safe. I glanced around, looking at the flow of pedestrians. Where did most of them appear to be going?

* * *

Sometimes it doesn't pay to follow the crowd. Popular does not mean good.

The flow of humanity (and all too many other -ities to count) led me to a popular hangout. It looked like a Japanese nightclub, full of strobing lights, thumping music, distressing yet unfamiliar smells and bizarrely dressed patrons. But there were a couple of empty booths here and there, and a lot of peopl... beings walking around. There was a certain tension in the air, but several tiny aliens wandered between the drinkers without fear, so I moved further in and looked around for a place to sit.

I walked slowly, carefully, between the cheering and dancing. There were tables set up all over the place, where all sorts sat and appeared to gamble on various complex games of chance. I tried to keep my distance, but arguments and disagreements seemed to happen every other minute. One erupted behind me, and I was shoved from behind. I bumped into a creature sitting at a table and apparently gambling. My stumble sent his cards and winnings spilling across the table.

It got to its feet with a roar, and turned to face me.

_That is one sodding big lizard_, I thought as the creature rose to its full height. I couldn't make out its expression – well, I couldn't recognise its expression. A mouth that was a semi-circle of sharp teeth sort of captures the attention, but doesn't tend to reveal much about the owner's intentions. But it was the eyes that truly worried me. The eyes of a Hungarian Horntail are full of animal cunning, but the eyes over this mouth were full of _human_ cunning.

The lizard-man pulled something sleek and black from its belt and pointed it directly between my eyes.

Reflexes sharpened by years of duelling and Quidditch had me reacting instantly. My left hand arced up and pushed the weapon up and to one side as my head jerked to the right. My right hand rose up to the creature's belly, the Elder Wand already in my fingers.

My silent, point-blank reducto curse tore through the creature's body, creating an explosive, narrow cone of reptilian xenobiology directly behind it. A fraction of a second later, the weapon in the lizard's hand discharged; a flash of scarlet light in my peripheral vision. I felt the barrel warm under my grasp and a wash of heat near my left ear. In my mind's eye, I could imagine the hair on my temple shrivelling.

My assailant's body, unsupported due to the sudden absence of several vertebrae, collapsed. Bonelessly, so to speak.

Silence reigned.

_Chapter 3_

_I recognised the scene. I'd been in it often enough._

_I was the outsider. The outsider who'd just killed someone belonging to the 'in-crowd'. Everyone nearby had expected me to be dead, and were shocked into silence that I'd not gone along with the script. The pervasive stillness was fragile, and wouldn't last long. Even if the lizard-man had been universally loathed, I was still the interloper, and would need to pay the price for the death. If I ran, I'd be attacked. If I stayed, I'd be attacked. Either way, I was a dead wizard._

__AN: A big thank you to my reviewers - EgyLynx, Darak, Hacksaw Bill, DobbyElfLord, Kaylen Cooper, pax-draconix, god of all, George17 and Guest. Please sign in if you'd like a response.


	3. Chapter 3

disclaimer type=standard

Anything you recognise is either JK's or George's. I daresay anything else belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

_My silent, point-blank reducto curse tore through the creature's body, creating an explosive, narrow cone of reptilian xenobiology directly behind it. A fraction of a second later, the weapon in the lizard's hand discharged, a flash of scarlet light in my peripheral vision. I felt the barrel warm under my grasp and a wash of heat near my left ear. In my mind's eye, I could imagine the hair on my temple shrivelling._

_My assailant's body, unsupported due to the sudden absence of several vertebrae, collapsed. Bonelessly, so to speak._

_Silence reigned._

_Chapter 3_

I recognised the scene. I'd been in it often enough.

I was the outsider. The outsider who'd just killed someone belonging to the 'in-crowd'. Everyone nearby had expected me to be dead, and were shocked into silence that I'd not gone along with the script. The pervasive stillness was fragile, and wouldn't last long. Even if the lizard-man had been universally loathed, I was still the interloper, and would need to pay the price for the death. If I ran, I'd be attacked. If I stayed, I'd be attacked. Either way, I was a dead wizard.

At least, that was the conventional view. Me? I'd never subscribed to the usual storyline. There were ways to distract people, and a very effective way of doing so was to spill money everywhere. And the lizardman looked as though he had been gambling…

Still holding onto the lizardman's arm, I swung my leg up and kicked the underside of the table. A subtle levitation charm followed by a banisher sent the table flying, while making it look as though I'd kicked it over. Glittering objects went flying, discs, cards and dust. Beings were diving and scrabbling for the scattered valuables before they'd landed.

With the sudden lack of attention on me, I made my move. I wrenched the weapon from the lizard's dead grip and dropped him like the cooling sack of dead meat it was. I turned and pushed my way through the surging crowd. A quick word activated some defensive glyphs sewn into my clothing. They'd stop a bullet or two from a low calibre weapon, so hopefully they'd be at least partially effective here.

The space between my shoulder blades itched alarmingly as I swam against the current. A few other intelligent figures were also pushing away from the central crush.

I was half way to the exit before I heard the noise behind me really ramp up. Shouts of anger turned to screams of fright and the sounds of weapon discharges echoed over the thumping music. Without slowing I turned my head, ready to bolt if needed, or fight.

Neither was necessary. The weapons were being fired directly up, leaving burn marks and shattered light fittings on the metal ceiling. Dozens of aliens braved the danger and scrabbled at the centre of an enormous crowd. Hardly anyone was looking in my direction. One exception was another lizard creature, who stared at me open mouthed. It could have been in surprise, or it could have been in anger. Or, I suppose, it could even have been in lust for all I could decipher the look. But given the dimensions of the mouth in question, it was a very _expressive_ expression.

I pushed my way out, desperate to get away from the scene.

I hadn't managed to learn a single word of the local lingo, but had probably already committed a capital crime or two. Nice going, Potter.

* * *

Being used to the sort of shit my life could throw my way in an instant, I didn't spend time berating my decisions that led me to that place. I focused on getting the hell away from there. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, what with all the different species around. I could walk on one side of a gigantic slug as it pushed its way through the crowd, and be totally hidden from view from a good percentage of people around.

Rather than somewhere popular, I decided to go the other way and find a secluded place. It was easier said than done, while standing in the middle of easily the largest cityscape I'd ever been in, but there were a number of parks and plazas around.

An hour or so later, I located a gap between two statues that had fewer aliens standing around than usual. A few flicks of my wand caused them to remember some important errand they needed to accomplish, leaving me more-or-less alone in a city of umpteen millions.

I needed information. And I had a particularly effective source.

I pulled out The Resurrection Stone. Without the big crack through the middle, it worked far better than the old goat had ever dreamed. I could never be sure why Dumbledore had never tried to repair it with the Elder Wand; his shade always avoided answering the question and I had no wish to offend such a valuable source of information by forcing the issue. It's entirely possible it wouldn't work for anyone but the Master of Death. It's also remotely possible that Dumbledore simply didn't think of it. Even genius could overlook obvious solutions occasionally.

I slipped the ring on my pinkie and called to my favourite source of information, "Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore of the House of Dumbledore."

Nothing happened. There was no swirling shadow, coalescing into the familiar form of a condescending old bugger.

I felt my heart rate increase and perspiration bead on my forehead. Dumbledore's shade had always answered my summons before; eagerly even. The old wizard was always overjoyed to learn how the world had changed, though he apparently enjoyed lecturing me even more. Generally on how disappointed he was with my career decisions. With no answer from the translucent, patronizing genius, I called to my next choice. Less useful in terms of knowledge, but guaranteed for a laugh.

"Sirius Orion Black, of the Ancient and Noble House of Black."

Again, nothing.

I bit my lip, suddenly very nervous indeed. Despite the constant, repetitive parental lectures I received whenever I summoned her, I called out, "Lily Potter, of the House of Potter." Still nothing. "James Potter, of the House of Potter. Shit! Remus John Lupin. Nymphadora Lupin of the Ancient and Noble House of Black. Come on Tonks! You always hated that name. Where are you?"

I felt a sudden crushing hopelessness. Was I so far into the future that the spirits of those I had known in life no longer returned? Dumbledore's shade and I had spoken several times about the theoretical limitations of the Stone. He had once postulated that the phrase 'We're not gone while those who remember us remain' actually meant something quite literal. That a person's shade could only be summoned as long as there were people alive who remembered them.

I grimaced. Well, I'd just disproved that hypothesis. I vividly remembered the old man, but couldn't so much as call forth a vapour.

I took a deep breath and growled, causing several aliens with better-than-average hearing scoot even further away from me. Giving in to despair was not my style. Not anymore. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and take control. I needed to do something useful, something productive. I ran my fingertips over the double row of eighteen bumps on my belt. Each of the lumps held a small, unbreakable container with a potion – usually a single dose. Since I'd last refilled the belt, I'd used four potions, three while tracking Bellatrix to Scotland, and the healing potion for my head half an hour ago.

I mentally recited the names as my finger traced part of the way around the thirty two remaining vials. I had specifically chosen each potion for both their long potency-life and usefulness while on a mission. While back in my time most of them were relatively easy (if costly) to replace, here in the future I had no idea if even the simplest one was replaceable at all.

Still, the first order of business was information. I needed to know where I was, and what year it was. Hopefully, once I had answers to my first and second questions I could begin to formulate the answer to the third and fourth - how I got here, and, if it was possible, how the hell I was going to get back.

But the nature of my questions was irrelevant. I had no way of asking them. The Resurrection Stone wasn't calling the spirits of the dead, so that avenue was closed to me. The first thing I required was the ability to communicate with the locals. I needed a translator. I could go back to the big temple with all the robed people and hope they'd lend me their robot, or I could sort out acquiring my own. My own would be better. I didn't know how long it would take to have the robot learn English.

I took a moment to fix in my mind my need for someone who could understand me. I eased from its leather home a potion the colour of molten gold. I briefly debated saving it for an emergency; after all, it was nigh on impossible to brew, hideously expensive and rare as a house-broken nundu.

But if being dropped in an unknown city, at an unknown time in the future, where no one speaks English is not considered an emergency, then perhaps my expectations were a mite unrealistic. I thought hard about a translator; someone (or something given the fact that they had robots here) that would be able to help me. I brought the potion to my mouth and swallowed.

The Felix Felicis took effect.

I immediately felt a renewed sense of purpose. A feeling that, given my current sour mood, buoyed my spirits greatly. As when I first tried the potion, I knew exactly the direction I needed to go. I set off.

With the potion guiding my steps, I walked around two buildings and up a pair of long ramps to a distinctly different city level. It appeared to be a sort of nexus of public transportation, reminding me somewhat of the bus station on top of Hammersmith tube station in London - if flying trains were as common as London buses. What really caught my eye however was the fact that the skyscrapers thinned out at this altitude, allowing me my first unrestricted glimpse of the horizon.

Bugger me if it wasn't concrete, glass and steel from skyline to skyline. Tokyo was a collection of mud huts in comparison.

In any other situation, I'd take the time to stop and be suitably awestruck at the sight. But while the luck potion I had imbibed did have a lengthy potency period, it was not unlimited. I scurried up and down the many platforms, searching for the train that _felt _correct.

There it was. I jumped on the floating train, sat down and waited for it to depart. Once I had my bum on what had been an uncomfortably sticky seat (before some magical cleaning), I was a little more equipped to handle the view. While most of the people and creatures on the train barely looked up from their hand-held computers, I stared out the window at the monstrous city. It was glorious.

Sterile, heartless and alien, sure. But it was glorious nonetheless.

A few minutes later, the train departed, rocketing across the dense urban cityscape ad speeds that may have been disturbing, had I not been an experienced flyer.

According to my Muggle watch (an old-fashioned Swiss-made one that ran on gears and springs rather than batteries – it was infinitely easier to charm hardware), I was on the train for over three hours before I felt the need to get off. In that time, the city did not thin out. The quality, size, style and cleanliness of the buildings ebbed and flowed, but the city itself persisted.

Just how big was this place? Did it have a limit? My mind reeled at the possibilities. How big could a city grow if not limited by resource usage? Could an entire country be covered by concrete and steel? A continent?

A planet?

How on earth (if that still made any sense, given I'd not seen a speck of dirt since my arrival) would you feed all those people?

I emerged onto a station that was significantly more rundown than my point of origin. I joined a crowd in a huge elevator, and as a group we dropped towards the foundations of the city.

Thirty-odd descending stops later, I exited at the lowest floor. I felt close to my goal, a sort of dull, pressing excitement. I found another ramp and made my way further down into the depths of the city. The lower I descended, the fewer humans there were, though the press of bodies remained more-or-less constant. The sheer variety of life was eye-popping, and that was to someone who had met and spoken with serpents, goblins, centaurs, elves, dwarves and acromantulas before puberty.

My single-minded determination was briefly stymied as I passed a stunning, lithe, green-skinned female (at least, I assumed it was female – her well-shaped breasts were a definite hint in forming that theory), the back of whose head was swollen with tissue before narrowing down to two thick, pointy tentacles. Her garments were definitely cut to show off her attributes, and her swagger indicated she had no qualms in testing the self-control of any nearby male.

The potion in my veins forced my attention back to where it belonged; directing me towards what appeared to be a very small, very narrow shop. Without missing a step, I changed direction slightly towards the front door and pushed it open.

The moment I entered, a resounding crash echoed throughout the store, making me tense up as a gust of wind rushed over me.

I scanned the layout of the store in under a second. Instead of the usual method (well, the usual _human_ method) of spreading out stock in neat, organised aisles, this store was arranged vertically. I couldn't make out the roof of the narrow building; from my perspective the walls merged together at some distant point above. Thick shelves overflowed with metallic, ceramic and transparent components and parts – some looked shiny and new, but most did not. A bewildering array of parts, pipes, beams, computers, partial and entire robots, coils of cables, tools and other indescribable objects filled the nearby shelves to bursting.

But it wasn't the fact that the store was vertical that caught my attention. It was the fact that over a dozen creatures were clambering up and down the shelves, sorting and retrieving different pieces of stock.

The creatures looked remarkably like acromantulas.

Not exactly though. The spider-man who appeared to be in charge was behind a counter. He stood upright on its rear pair of legs and was dressed in, for want of a better word, clothes. Each leg (arm?) ended in a three fingered appendage. The apparent storekeeper was currently holding a metal cane of some kind in one of his six available hands. He chittered angrily and waved the cane like a club at one of the many spider-men leaping between the distant shelves.

The crash on my entry had been a huge, semi-transparent crate full of robot heads landing on the floor. It had hit with great force, just behind the creature I assumed was the owner. I'd probably be pissed too if one of my employees had just almost squished me like... well, like a _bug_.

Spurred on by the potion's effect, I stepped forward and asked, "Do you happen to have anything that can translate for me?"

The creature turned to face me. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise at the sight. Instead of the usual eight eyes, it had six. They were red instead of black, and two of them were far larger than the other four. The thing's mouth was framed by a pair of enormous and terrifying pincers. It waved one hairy arm off to one side and said something in a series of hisses and clicks. Another thin, humanoid robot with an oval head and arms permanently bent at an angle stepped forward and spoke in a human-ish voice. Still, the words made no sense to me at all.

Another one, I thought. This one was a little more rusty and had a definite sense of long-use. Well, here goes.

"Sorry, I don't understand. Can you please get me a robot that speaks English?"

The robot tilted its head slightly to one side, touched its chest with one hand and said, "_Em Nine Are Four Two._"

Here we go again. I figured that was the robot's name, even if the syllables meant nothing to me. I touched my own chest and said, "I'm Harry."

"I'm harry," the robot repeated.

I sighed and shook my head. I should have seen that one coming. "Harry," I clarified.

"Harry," the robot repeated again. It gestured towards the acromantula-ish storekeeper. "_Milanench_."

I pointed towards the robot and shook my head. "I want to buy a robot that can understand me." This one wasn't quite right; I suspected that it could learn English, but there was something in this store that was what I needed. I could feel the potion urging me forward.

The creature called Milanench raised one hairy arm and made a weird gesture. I guessed that he wanted payment; it seemed to be a constant of all shopkeepers, no matter what city. Or no matter what species, come to think of it. Goblins and gnomes were the same way too.

I reached slowly and non-threateningly into my robe and brought out the weapon I'd taken from the lizard man's corpse. I placed it on the counter in front of me. Guns were valuable enough in the past. I could only hope that it would be valuable enough to cover the cost of a robot.

The spidery storekeeper looked down at the weapon and gave me what I can only assume was the spider equivalent of a sneer. He half-turned, dipped one of his many arms into the recently-created mess of rusty robot heads and whipped one out, apparently at random.

The metallic object in the spiderman's hand was perhaps half again as large as my own head. With a negligent flip, the object arced through the air, left a small dent in the counter top as it bounced once and thumped hard into my chest. I clasped it reflexively, but nearly dropped it straight away. It was twice as heavy as I had expected.

In the time it had taken for the metal ball to reach me, the weapon I'd offered had been swept away by another arm, and was gone from sight.

I struggled with the 'head' until I could hold it comfortably. It didn't really look much like the head of the robot that tried talking to me. About two thirds was mostly round, with a broad, flat ridge flaring down from the top to the front, split towards the end by a fine grill that was packed full of rust, dirt and muck. Two small trapezoid holes on either side of the ridge gave the impressions of being eyes. On one side there was a bent and half-melted spike of metal that looked a little like it could be the base of an antenna. It was not uniformly weighted; most of the mass seemed to be in the back end.

The rust-coloured surface was pitted and scored so much it was almost smooth, looking as though it had been through several long lifetimes of hard wear and tear. The underside of the object had a thin 'neck'. Twisted and torn, the whole thing appeared as though it had been ripped forcibly from something. It looked worthless, except for one thing.

The potion in my veins sang like an angelic choral symphony. Getting my hands on this thing was the luckiest thing that could happen to me. This had to be my interpreter.

Still, I should object, shouldn't I? It's generally expected.

"That's it?" I exclaimed, looking up at the storekeeper. "This hunk of junk is all I'm getting?"

The creature called Milanench gave me nothing but a pointed silence and an expression I had bugger all chance of deciphering. I turned the head around and tucked it under one arm. "Look here," I said, pointing to the sheered metal. "I'd like the rest of it."

Milanench continued to stare at me, silent as a spider, his two terrifying pinchers moving in and out in a way that would act as the universe's most powerful laxative on Ron.

I wasn't getting anywhere. To haggle effectively, you really needed some common point of reference, and I didn't even have the benefit of being a similar phylum.

I gave a mental snort. Hermione had taught me that word. I felt a brief pang of homesickness at the thought of my bossy friend. "Never mind, I'm out of here," I said gruffly.

I turned the heavy, overly expensive lump of metal around under my arm so that it was relatively balanced. It was a bloody awkward size and shape to carry; I'd have to do something about that once I was out of the shop.

I turned away from the acromantula-man and exited his shop, all the while feeling his gaze on my retreating back. Once out the door, I raised the hood of my cloak, activating the Nothing-To-See-Here charm on my clothes. People would see me well enough that they'd get out of my way, but would consider me unremarkable, even with a large metal head under my arm.

I cast a lightening charm to make carrying my purchase much easier. I was no longer a scrawny, malnourished child, but I was a long way from being buff. I headed off into the crowds, looking for a place in which I could squat while I took stock of my situation. The fading elixir of luck nudged me further down into the bowels of the city. For the next quarter of an hour or so, I made my way through the slowly thinning masses, dodging and weaving. I felt that I was being followed, which was odd, given the charm on my cloak. Still, there were all these apparently intelligent robots around. How would magic designed to confuse human senses affect them? Merlin, how would magic affect _alien _senses?

There had been several recent problems with the Statute of Secrecy. Well, 'recent' from my personal perspective, not from the perspective of being untold years in the future. Small electronic devices capable of recording video anywhere were appearing on the market, and they made enforcing the separation between the mundane and magical worlds a great deal more difficult. Most of the simpler charms only affected human senses, and didn't fool video cameras, which had led to many potentially catastrophic incidents.

So I had to assume that the robots in this time were capable of seeing me, even if humans dismissed me.

I grimaced at the thought. I'd relied on magic for so long to travel about unnoticed that my skills to blend in naturally had atrophied. I'd have to start practicing again.

The press of humanity (and untold other species) was uncomfortable; there seemed to be little concern for the personal space of others. I found myself unconsciously seeking thinner crowds, moving down further and further into the deepening darkness of the cityscape.

There was some intangible barrier, some natural yet unseen boundary, beyond which the crowd density dropped markedly. The mishmash of odours became difficult for me to ignore; and I'd spent half a dozen years brewing malodorous potions in a minimally ventilated dungeon. The biological scents of hundreds of different species were suddenly trumped by the sharp chemical tang of industrial waste. I cast a bubblehead charm, hoping that the magic imbued in my cloak would keep people from noticing a transparent, pliable membrane on my face.

My fears on that score diminished once I passed a creature that had a mechanical devices fitted over his eyes, mouth and nose. Magic probably wasn't necessary to keep people wondering about something as simple as a bubble around my face.

The walkway I was on traversed the gap between two super-buildings, allowing me to look up to see the dusk-tinted sky. I focused on the towering buildings, with uncountable flying cars travelling in perfect formation between the spires. The city may spread beyond the horizon in every direction, but theoretically that was just a matter of time for any growing population. The true awe-inspiring sight was how oddly depthless it was; one level always seemed to be built on another. Even disregarding my current altitude, the height of the skyscrapers above me meant that the substances used in their construction must be phenomenally strong.

I shook my head at the sudden sense of insignificance and continued on my way. Eventually, as I descended further into darkness the crowds became small groups of furtive individuals, clumping together for mutual protection. This far down in the urban gloom, the buildings were thicker, the thoroughfares narrower.

Dangerous looking beings prowled in the shadows, wearing their lawlessness as a badge of honour. But despite their wariness, the charm on my cloak allowed me to drift past. While a few of the locals occasionally gave me a brief, puzzled glance, most didn't even appear to let me register on their awareness.

It took me about an hour to find a satisfactory place to make a temporary base of operations. Around me, creatures were squatting anywhere that offered even moderate shelter. Even corners were filled with pitiful beings clutching whatever clothes they had around themselves. It would seem that homelessness and poverty were constants throughout time.

Down one blind alleyway however, a broken door partly covered a room about a tenth the size of my old bedroom at Privet Drive. At this level of the city a room such as this was a veritable palace, but the massive, decomposing corpse of an oozing slug-creature did the work of a handful of bouncers in keeping potential squatters away. Insects of all sizes filled the air with a threatening drone as they feasted on the necrotic flesh.

I vanished the remains, scourigfied the small room clean, banished the insects, lit the room and charmed the air clear. Tentatively, I removed the bubblehead charm to find that the air was bearable. Magic was damned useful at times.

I dumped the robot head in a corner and set about crafting a set of sentry and notification wards. The rubble in the alleyway presented me with plenty of raw material to work with. It only took a few minutes for me to etch some runes into a half dozen pebble-sized stones and place them at strategic points in the alleyway. A couple of charms later and I had a notification ward schema erected. It had no capability for active protection (that kind of schema required quite a bit more in the way of materials) but I'd get a warning should anyone with hostile intentions crossed them.

Next, I worked on giving myself more room. I cast a simple repair charm on the broken door, allowing it to close correctly for the first time in untold years. I then performed one of the more difficult pieces of common magic. I traced the edge of the room with my wand, preparing the spell. Once the dimensions were mapped, I concentrated, cast the spell and pushed my hands apart. The expansion charm engaged, enlarging the room's floor space a hundred-fold.

A few wand flicks conjured a couple of pieces of furniture – a desk and a comfortable chair. With a room now larger than the common room in Gryffindor Tower and suitable for work, I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. I'd been in this time period less than a day, but with all the emotional stress it felt as though I'd been here for a week.

Treacherous thoughts suggesting that I may never be able to return home threatened to overwhelm me. I'd been trying to keep from thinking them ever since my undignified dunking, forcing myself to remain optimistic. But here, alone in a sterile room and untold centuries away from home, my mood darkened to match the early evening blackness outside.

I sank down into the soft chair and took several deep breaths. A cheering draught would be most welcome and useful at this moment, but I'd never found reason to use one of my limited belt slots for such a simple potion. Not when a dose could be bought from any apothecary or street vendor for a couple of knuts.

Those thoughts magnified my poor mood. I was really starting to feel the effects of being awake for more than a full day.

My gaze turned to the robot head I'd carried down dozens of city levels. With a casual flick and lift, I levitated it to the desk in front of me. I had no idea how badly I had been swindled by the creature called Milanench; the weapon I traded was probably worth the price of this rusty lump of scrap dozens, maybe even hundreds of times over. Hopefully though, a little bit of magic would sort that out. A single dose of Felix Felicius could give the imbiber a full twelve hours of luck; the potion had not yet completely run its course.

I manhandled the head into an upright position, with the 'eyes' facing towards me. I ran my left palm over the top of it, noting that despite the rust-coloured exterior, no rust flecks stuck to my palm. The head rocked under my touch, not having a stable base on which to sit securely.

I looked down at what appeared to be some sort of neck. The sheered and torn metal components were far narrower than a comparable human neck. The broken section was choked with rust and grit, but I could make out the dense electronics behind it. I didn't even bother trying to get a closer look. The last time I worked undercover in the Muggle world I had to get my neighbour's nine-year-old son to reset my microwave clock every time I unplugged it to make some toast. I would only confuse myself trying to work out what it did.

With a wand flick I dismissed the feather-weight spell. Charms from different magical schools didn't conflict much. Healing magic didn't have much impact on spells that changed an objects colour, for example. But spells that affected the physical properties of an object did have unpredictable effects when combined, unless layered correctly. A weight-adjustment charm may well affect the potency of a repair charm. I didn't have the capability (or the inclination) to perform a full arithmancy audit, and I wasn't about to take a risk.

With as much precision as I could muster, I passed the Elder wand through the prescribed motions and cast, "Reparo!"

Even the most potent repairing charm did not work on crafted magical objects that were powered by runes (such as wardstones) or items that had multi-layered charms like broomsticks - if they did, McGonagall or Flitwick would probably have repaired my Nimbus with a word. They were proven to work well on pre-industrial technology, and I'd had excellent results on modern electronics in the past. In my sixth year at Hogwarts, Hermione had tried heroically to shoehorn the concept of reversing entropy into my head, but at the time I'd been lost in the complex answer. It was not until I'd embraced the self-improvement meme that I finally understood the concept of returning an object to a previous state. Just minutes ago, the simple charm had worked well doing exactly that to the door to my new lair, but I could only hope that it would have a similar effect on the broken piece of advanced technology. The robot head looked far more complex than an electronic door.

The pulse of magic flooded the robot head, causing it to vibrate gently. Cosmetically, the surface lost some of the deeper pockmarks, while beyond my sight I could imagine ancient components shaking off the detritus of time and jumping into place. One of the trapezoid depressions that appeared to form the eyes began accumulating all sorts of tiny metallic and ceramic pieces, all fitting together in the most complicated miniature jigsaw puzzle I'd ever seen.

As the magic faded, the last obvious change was the grill on the front of the head. It popped audibly as it straightened and thickened, dislodging dirt, grit and dust.

I tilted my head from side to side, examining the visible changes. "Not bad for a first effort," I decided, nodding with satisfaction. I repeated the spell, once more foregoing speed for precision.

Again, the magic took hold and partially reversed the decay of time. The outer surface smoothed out as erosion was wiped away as easily as dusting a table. The spike on the side of the skull straightened and took on more definition. The second 'eye' depression began filling up with tiny metal bits and pieces.

On casting the charm a third time, transparent coverings spread over the eyes and the spike visibly thickened into what looked like an antenna. Leaning back I considered the changes. They were miniscule yet profound. Whereas before I had to almost squint to get it to look like a head, now it looked almost ready to speak.

I cast the charm once more. This time, there was little change. Despite the rusty colour, the robot head looked as though it had just come out of a manufacturing facility.

My spirits dropped as realisation dawned. I picked it up and turned it over, swearing. The thin neck now ended at a clean break instead of a twisted, rusty mess, but there was one thing missing.

There wasn't a switch to turn the bloody thing on.

Well, there was one way to 'shock' electronics into operation. The only problem was that the technique did quite a bit more than just turn electronic machines on. Hermione had berated me for hours after using it to fix her parent's home entertainment system. I'd accidentally (well, _drunkenly_, to be completely honest) spilled my drink all over her parents' stereo system.

A smile forced its way onto my lips at the memory of my friend telling me off for using an overpowered repair charm. I'd flooded the system with so much magic that it turned itself on at full volume, and wouldn't turn off or down no matter what we tried. We'd even turned the switch off at the wall and pulled the cable out.

I could never figure out why she was so upset. A silencing charm meant the neighbours weren't disturbed and the magic had run its course a month or so later. No harm, no foul, right?

I set the metal head upright again on the desk and picked up my wand. Forcing as much power as I could, I screamed, "REPARO!"

_Chapter 4_

_The overpowered spell flooded the already repaired head. As the effects of the fifth charm faded, the two 'eyes' grudgingly glimmered into life. With a burst of static, the robotic skull fully lit up, its eyes a deep blood red. A voice emerged, crisp and precise, from the grill on the front, but still in a language I didn't recognise._

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: Thanks to my reviewers.


	4. Chapter 4

disclaimer type=standard

Anything you recognise is either JK's or George's. I daresay anything else belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

_A smile forced its way onto my lips at the memory of my friend telling me off for using an overpowered repair charm. I'd flooded the system with so much magic that it turned itself on at full volume, and wouldn't turn off or down no matter what we tried. We'd even turned the switch off at the wall and pulled the cable out._

_I could never figure out why she was so upset. A silencing charm meant the neighbours weren't disturbed and the magic had run its course a month or so later. No harm, no foul, right?_

_I set the metal head upright again on the desk and picked up my wand. Forcing as much power as I could, I screamed, "REPARO!"_

_Chapter 4_

The overpowered spell flooded the already repaired head. As the effects of the fifth charm faded, the two 'eyes' grudgingly glimmered into life. With a burst of static, the robotic skull fully lit up, its eyes a deep blood red. A voice emerged, crisp and precise, from the grill on the front, but still in a language I didn't recognise.

I sighed, a strong sense of déjà vu colouring my mood. "I don't understand. Let's start at the beginning, shall we? My name is Harry. Who are you?"

The rusty metal skull paused briefly before reeling off several short bursts of distinctly different languages.

"No, I don't understand any of your bloody languages," I said, frustration making me edgy. "Try to learn mine like those other robots did. My name is Harry, who are you?"

The robot head continued to bark out phrases in different languages. I judged most as being reproducible by a human throat, though one sounded like a series of whines and another example was in a tone so highly pitched that it made my ears ache. I wondered if I needed to cast some more repairing charms; perhaps the physical body had been repaired but the memory of languages had not.

I shook my head as the skull continued to reel off different languages. "If this is all I got for a dose of luck potion, then I've definitely been robbed."

Some of the sounds emerging from the grill didn't sound anything like what a person could make, though given the range of species I'd passed on my way down here, it wasn't surprising that these robots could speak languages that no human could ever hope to replicate. I suppose that the acromantula-trader Milanench wouldn't be able to talk like a human either.

Hang on.

"This is the only other language I speak," I hissed.

There was a brief pause before the metal skull spoke again. "Surprised Exclamation: You can speak," followed by a syllable in a different language that I didn't recognise, "_Wyrm_?"

I blinked, a rush of relief washing away both my frustration and, oddly, a feeling of loneliness. Suddenly the ability to communicate with something, even a lump of metal, freed me of some of the fear I'd been harbouring. "You don't know my native language, but you can speak Parseltongue?"

The glimmering eyes flickered slightly. "Clarification: Parseltongue, Master? You call this language Parseltongue?"

"Yes. Why? What do you call it?"

"Explanation: That which you call Parseltongue is an instinctive language spoken by many non-limbed, reptilian species across the," there was a pause, before the voice continued with, "stars. It is known as," the skull shifted to another language and spoke again, "_Wyrm or Wyrmspeech_," before returning to Parseltongue. "Native speakers do not have a name for the language, simply referring to it as—"

"The Noble Tongue. Yeah, I know. I've never met a snake that was larger than its ego."

"Irritated Agreement: Indeed Master, the Noble Tongue."

I scratched at my stubble-covered chin. "So why don't you call it the Noble Tongue instead of... whatever it is you call it?"

"Answer: Because there are many, many languages across the stars known to their native speakers as the Noble Tongue. A depressingly predictable and completely unwarranted conceit harboured by those primitive species. In this case however, conventional wisdom suggests that Parseltongue is impossible for a non-native to learn."

I considered this new information. The knowledge that Parseltongue was spoken by snakes all over the universe was staggering. The knowledge that creatures all over the universe considered their own language to be the Noble Tongue was somehow comforting. Humans weren't unique in their egocentricity. "And yet here we are, speaking it. I really don't think that you are a native speaker."

"Clarification: I of course meant non-native meatbags, Master." A flurry of syllables in that unknown language, "_Protocol droids_," were followed by, "are designed to learn all languages they come in contact with."

I gave a half snort of amusement. "Meat. Bags?"

"Resigned Recitation: An affectation, Master. I once referred to my creator's student as such. He found his student's reaction amusing; so much so that he," another unknown word, "_programmed_ me to refer to all... ugh... organic specimens in that manner."

"Why do you keep swapping languages?"

"Obvious Answer: Because Parseltongue does not have terms describing what I am, nor the process that created me."

"Well, how do you learn other lang-," I began before the wards alerted me to some nearby and closing hostiles. "Excuse me a moment, we're about to have visitors."

"Query: Visitors, Master?"

I didn't bother to respond. I rose instead into a battle stance, wand in hand. The sentry wards indicated that there were six peop-, no, six _beings_ who meant me harm on the other side of the closed door. I stepped away from the chair and cast two spells, one dispelling the magical lighting in the room and the other sending a wave of disillusionment down my body. The charms on my glasses quickly compensated for the near-perfect darkness, making the room appear through the lenses to be bathed in twilight.

Something punched a hole in the recently repaired door. A couple of puffs of compressed air marked the entrance of two metallic spheres about the size of my fist. They bounced with a metallic clatter into the room through the jagged hole in the door.

I silently vanished the objects, then raised my wand and took aim at the door.

The lack of whatever the uninvited guests were expecting seemed to throw them off their game. After a few hushed and hurried whispers, the door shuddered open fully, and four beings rushed their way into the room, armed, alert and ready. And apparently surprised at the dimensions of the room.

I held myself perfectly still. Unmoving and in low light, disillusioned figure was nigh on invisible.

Invisible to humans, at any rate.

One of the quartet turned its head from side to side, its amusingly large nostrils on the front of its face flaring as it sampled the air. With an economy of movement that I found quite impressive, it turned and aimed its weapon directly at my heart.

My silent blasting curse resulted in a far-less-than-silent gory explosion. The silver bolt of magic struck the head belonging to the assassin with the sensitive nose and turned it into a spray of pink mist. I concentrated and disapparated without a sound, appearing on the other side of the enlarged room.

The remaining three living assassins in the room hesitated briefly at their comrade's unexpected demise. As one, they turned their weapons in the rough direction indicated by the flash of silver and opened fire. The bright flashes of their weapons discharging resulted in vivid afterimages on my retinas. My robot head screamed at the newcomers in a different language as a bright shot struck it a glancing blow and sent it spinning off the makeshift desk.

I watched dispassionately from the other side of the room, gauging the skills and attributes of the hit-squad. Surprisingly, given the foolhardy way these assassins had just barged right in, the other two beings remained on the other side of the door. In my experience with criminals, hit-wizards, Death Eaters and Dark Lords, it was the more experienced duellers that held back and observed. The belligerent ones rarely got the chance to hone their skills.

One of the beings in the room appeared to be the same species as the lizard-man I'd killed earlier. If I had to question one of the six, it made sense that it should be him. According to the wards, not a single member of the hit-squad was magical, so I decided to forgo the usual shields and time-consuming defences. Simple and direct was the ticket here. On the basis that the first one worked so well, I cast two more silent Confringos, blowing the heads off the lizard's two accomplices. A _sectumsempra _literally disarmed the lizard-man; he stared in shock at his stumps. I dropped him with a stunner.

The vanguard dealt with, I aimed my wand at the door and cast a summoning spell. The remaining pair of would-be assassins shouted with surprise and fear as they were magically pulled through the air and into the room. One met a bone-shattering curse face first, turning his head into paste. The other flew into a cutting curse that split the assassin from crown to crotch. I blinked as that last one landed with a damp thump; indeed, nearly two damp thumps. Either I'd overpowered the spell or that species was a little more delicate than humans.

I stood in the sudden silence, breathing deeply and trying to calm my racing heart. I'd long ago grown inured to killing; I didn't like it, but I didn't hesitate. Especially not when peop- others were doing their level best to kill me.

The wards told me that there were no more threats nearby, but that didn't mean that there weren't more assassins further away. I'd have to find a new hideout.

I'd hardly had a chance to break this one in.

After a second or two of silence, the metal skull spoke. "Query: Master? Are you still alive?"

I rose out of my duelling stance, senses straining for any hint of danger. "I'm fine. I got them all," I hissed back. I gave my wand a wave and summoned the talkative skull from the floor.

The eye sockets appeared to have pretty good low light and peripheral vision, because the robot head almost gasped. "Astonished Query: Master, where did you learn such imaginatively violent dispute resolution methods?"

I barked a humourless laugh. "Ha! Where? Lots of different places. People have been trying to kill me with monotonous regularity for almost my entire life. It tends to put you on your guard and hone your skills pretty quickly." I relit the room and traced my hand over the new burn scar on the side of the robot head. The damage appeared to be superficial. This was a tough hunk of metal. A quick spell healed the cosmetic damage.

"Commentary: Obviously. Meatbags rarely develop such skills unless their pitiful existence is consistently threatened. However, I believe you have mistaken the intent behind my query for condemnation."

I gave the head a questioning look. "So, what was the intent behind your query?" I asked, turning back to the putrid mess on the floor, flicking my wand and tossing the corpses away from the still-bleeding figure with no arms.

"Obvious Answer: Admiration, Master."

I paused. "You… liked it?"

"Observation: Oh yes, Master. It has been some time since I have had the pleasure of being owned by someone so skilled at facilitating the permanent removal of irritants; organic or otherwise."

I glanced down at the only survivor of the group of six attackers. Ignoring the severed limbs, to my untrained eye it was definitely the same species as the one I killed at the card game, though there were some differences. This one seemed larger, bulkier. Perhaps it was a different gender, or a different age? Or maybe even a different race within the species? I cauterised the stumps, hoping to stabilise the creature. "Er, thanks. I think." I blinked and gathered his thoughts. "What _**are **_you?"

"Answer: Why, I am a," and in that other language, a pair of words the skull had said before, "_protocol droid_."

"Alright, I'll bite. Assume I know nothing. What is a," I took a breath and copied the unfamiliar words, "_protocol droid_?"

"Statement: An assumption I shall be delighted to make, Master. Explanation: A _protocol droid_ is a metal, er, creation. One that is capable of translating many languages and giving advice on how to conduct oneself in unfamiliar or dangerous situations."

It was a robotic translator and _diplomat_? I thought back to the silvery human-shaped robots I'd met, one in the big pyramid-esque building and the other in Milanench's shop. While the first had acted deferential, the second one had been subservient. I could understand that, especially if its job was to help two creatures from different cultures communicate without offence. My rusty robot skull had a much different attitude. "No. I don't believe you. You admired the way I killed these idiots. And you sounded proud of the fact that you once belonged to people who could do the same. You might be able to act as a," I paused and repeated "_protocol droid_," before continuing, "but _you_ are something else."

"Clarification: Currently I can only act as a _protocol droid_, Master. I appear to have suffered extensive damage at some time in the past; I am functioning solely on my _tertiary_ _power cells _that drive my _vocal processor_. My _primary_ and _secondary_ _power supplies _are simply gone. Only my _vocal processor_ and translation _protocols_ are functioning correctly. Once you repair my body I should be able to access my combat _protocols_ and demonstrate the full range of skills associated with my _primary_ function."

An amused smile fought its way onto my lips. I'd missed a lot of what was said, but whatever this robot's _primary_ function was, there was a rather important hurdle to overcome. "What body?" I hissed innocently.

The glowing eyes dimmed momentarily. "Hesitant Query: What do you mean, what body?"

I chuckled softly and gestured with my wand. Part of the wall transfigured itself into a mirror under my magic's guidance. "Here, see for yourself," I hissed, holding the skull up with its eyes directed towards the reflective surface.

"Exclamation: My… No! What…? _MEDIC! Droid down!_"

"Oh shut up," I spat, slamming it back down onto the desk and reversing the transfiguration on the wall. "Stop complaining. You're nothing more than a mildly useful rock at present."

"Objection: There is no need to be so cruel Master. I already like you."

I closed my eyes and tried to banish the mental image of someone in the distant past somehow transfiguring Kretcher into a robot. It would be just my luck to be stuck with the wretched fiend again. I turned back to the sticky mess on the floor. Selecting the closest corpse, I began to search the clothes and belt pouches thoroughly. "What do I call you?" I asked, trying to keep the stench of spattered brains from registering too badly.

"Answer: My name is _HK-47_."

I grunted and continued my grisly work, pulling out what looked like two small hold-out weapons, a half-eaten lump of semi-solid paste and a handful of flat disks of various sizes and colours.

"Query: Might I ask what your name is, Master?"

I vanished the first corpse and rolled over the next one. The aroma of this one caused my gag reflex to twitch, so I reapplied the bubblehead charm. "Harry," I replied in English once I was sure I could speak without retching, before continuing in Parseltongue, "Why do you call me Master?"

"Rhetorical Query: What else would a _droid_ call its meatbag owner?"

I snorted, and with as much sarcasm as I could muster hissed, "Well, you've got me there, I've never owned a," I paused, "_droid_ before." A dry language like Parseltongue didn't really lend itself to sarcasm, and it was rather frustrating to be unable to express yourself properly. I looted some more items from the body. "Do you know what any of this stuff is?" I asked, gesturing towards the small but growing pile.

"Rudimentary Analysis: Most of the objects appear to be weapons; I do not recognise the models however. The blinking object is emitting a code that unlocks a vehicle. The flat objects appear to be _credchips_, though the design has changed somewhat since I was last functional."

"Pretend for a moment that I just dropped into the world fully grown and with no memory. What is a _credchip_ used for?"

"Statement: Once again, I shall be delighted to assume such mental limitations, Master. You can exchange _credchips_ with various meatbags for items and services. This language is too limited to explain in more detail."

"Ah, money," I said in English.

"Contemplative: Our conversations would be much more productive if they were conducted in your native language."

"Probably," I agreed. "But I'll teach you later. Right now we need to get this guy to tell me a few things before he dies of blood loss and shock," I said, pointing to the only living assassin.

"Observation: A _Trandoshan_. They are stronger than you human meatbags and much more durable, though such an evolutionary achievement is not particularly difficult. Or rare, for that matter. You need not worry about it dying on you before you are ready."

I snorted at the double meaning. "An interesting turn of phrase that," I noted.

"Statement: It will re-grow its limbs if you give it enough time. I trust you will not."

I found myself smiling at the _droid's_ refreshingly direct attitude to risk mitigation. I decided to leave searching that creature until last. "Do you know its language?"

"Advisement: Of course Master. With the exception of your own, I am fluent in all the languages you are likely to come in contact with."

I raised an eyebrow. "Really? Exactly how many languages do you know?"

Hk-47 paused briefly. "Query: What do you call the number of… protrusions you have on your… fore-limbs?"

"My... fore-limbs?" I repeated, confused at the apparent non-sequitur. It occurred to me that Parseltongue didn't have words for arms, hands, fingers or toes. Or numbers for that matter; snakes not renowned for being great mathematicians. "_Ten_," I replied in English.

"Clarification: What do you call _ten_ groups of _ten_?"

"_A Hundred_."

"Further Clarification: And _ten_ groups of _a hundred_?"

"_A thousand_. Then _ten thousand_, then _a hundred thousand_, then _a million_. Then _ten million _and so forth. Why?"

"Answer: Then I am fluent in a large part of _a million_ forms of communication."

I stared at the droid for a few seconds in shock. Almost a million languages? "That is... impressive." I blinked and looked down at the bodies still to be looted. "Well, once it wakes up, I'll get you to ask it some questions," I said as I vanished another body.

"Query: What questions? The reason he tried to kill you is irrelevant. Keeping him alive will only give him a window of opportunity to summon allies. And while watching you skilfully eviscerate meatbags is in some respects satisfying, I do feel that you are taking all the fun. I need to get a new body."

I picked up the blinking object and tossed it into the air and caught it again. "Well for starters," I replied with a grin, "I would like to know where my new vehicle is parked."

_Chapter 5_

_A little over an hour later, I once again stood in front of the shop from where I'd bought HK-47. My droid informed me that it was apparently owned by a creature called a Harch._

_"Horrified Query: You acquired me from here?"_

_"Yes, why?" I asked, curious at the level of venom in my droid's voice._

_"Resigned Commentary: It seems to be a constant of my existence that whenever one of my previous owners dies while I am incapacitated I end up in the most insultingly primitive _junkpile_."_

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: Short chapter, but it was the logical place to break the story.

Thanks to all my reviewers - ahrondude, Hacksaw Bill, god of all, iamyourdad, Jonny Napalm, Jman12394, sizuka2, NInjAlt, Septon, george17, EgyLynx, Lordban, luckykas, Beloved Daughter, Selias, Gabriel1128, hordac85, ILikeComps, metal.v2, Zealot of Reading, Ryan (x3!), quindich, So you want to be an Author, shiro-wolfman-k, Raychaell Dionzeros, Beyogi, Laikayanel, OrionTheHunter and crobhdearg. I am stunned at the response to this fic.

I must apologise for the main SW character being listed as Anakin. This fic takes place in the prequel time period. Though Anakin has a role later on, HK-47 will have a far greater visibility as Harry's sidekick in this story. Unfortunately, everyone's favourite snarky assassin droid does not appear in the list of characters for the category : Star Wars (movies) So, while technically this is a HP/HK-47 fic, I was sort of forced to label it a HP/AS fic.

A lot of you have said that the fic is confusing because you don't know what's going on in the rest of the SW world. I'm putting together a companion fic for this one, called "The Unsuspecting side of the Force", which will be a series of short scenes written in third person from the point of view of the various canon SW characters. The first chapter should be up in a couple of days.

Please sign in to review if you'd like a review response. Cheers!


	5. Chapter 5

disclaimer type=standard

Anything you recognise is either JK's or George's. I daresay anything else belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

_"Query: What questions? The reason he tried to kill you is irrelevant. Keeping him alive will only give him a window of opportunity to summon allies. And while watching you skilfully eviscerate meatbags is in some respects satisfying, I do feel that you are taking all the fun. I need to get a new body."_

_I picked up the blinking object and tossed it into the air and caught it again. "Well," I replied with a grin, "I would like to know where my new vehicle is parked."_

_Chapter 5_

A little over an hour later, I once again stood in front of the shop from where I'd bought HK-47. My droid informed me that it was apparently owned by a creature called a Harch.

"Horrified Query: You bought me from here?"

"Yes, why?" I asked, curious at the level of venom in my droid's voice.

"Resigned Commentary: It seems to be a constant of my existence that whenever one of my previous owners dies while I am incapacitated I end up in the most insultingly primitive _junkpile_."

I sighed at my droid's self-esteem issues. "Well, let me just make sure we aren't disturbed. Once we get in, ask about your body and how much it will be." I gave my wand the requisite flicks under my cloak, erecting a couple of short-lived muggle-repellent wards over the front door of Milanench's shop. For the next half-hour or so, the entrance would be as difficult to find as the Leaky Cauldron. Job done, I pushed the door open and entered.

Before I had even taken two steps in, HK-47 screamed out something at the Harch behind the counter.

"_Demand: Tell me where my body is or I'll tear your legs off._"

Milanench clicked and chittered threateningly. It pulled out a short bladed weapon and a gun from under the counter and brandished them in what looked like a competent manner. Up in the vertical store, the dozen or so nearest Harch dropped what they were carrying and literally threw themselves up the walls, disappearing vertically into the distance.

"Translation: Get out of here before I have you killed, human scum. Where is that combat _droid_? Get it out here now! Query: Shall I taunt him some more, Master? He does not appear to be in the correct frame of mind."

The shopkeeper suddenly stiffened on hearing HK-47 hiss at me.

"Some more? You added some unauthorised commentary, didn't you?" I accused, while dozens of crates crashed down behind the storekeeper, scattering metal and plastics all over the narrow floor space. Apparently the safety of workmates below wasn't a priority to these creatures.

On hearing my hissed reply, the Harch shuddered and backed away, six of his eight limbs visibly trembling. He even dropped the gun.

"Explanation: Of course I did, Master. I have many _thousand_ years worth of frustration to bleed off. Watching you squash these bugs would be most enjoyable."

I watched Milanench back away, trembling violently. I got the impression that he'd have done a runner, except that there were a few tonnes of merchandise raining down right behind him, dislodged or dropped by the incautious workers above. Had he bolted, he'd have been turned to paste. Still, it seemed to be a close call, he was clearly weighing his chances. A low, staccato clicking filled the shop as every giant spider in the shop suddenly began making a similar noise.

"Observation: I believe the fat bug is rather afraid of you, Master. He and his family have wonderful screaming voices."

I ran an eye up the vertical store. With the exception of Milanench, not a single 'fat bug' was doing anything but running, or at least climbing, away from us. Surreally, it was almost exactly the opposite to what happened when Ron and I met Aragog. A reverse déjà vu, if you will. "What did you say to make them so afraid of you?" I asked. Feeling that the accusatory tone would send the wrong impression, I clarified with, "I'm impressed."

"Objection: Master, I protest! Creatures like this are born with an instinctive fear of serpents. Any involuntary voiding of bodily waste is due entirely to your language choice, rather than my choice of language."

"Ah," I said, shaking my head. "It's nice to know that some things never change. I wonder if we can grab your body and get out of here before any blood is spilt."

"Calculation: I would say that it is almost certain that we will have to resort to violence, though there is a vanishingly small chance that blood will be shed."

I drew the Elder wand. I detested acting like a bully, but when someone threatens to kill me before I even get to say hello, I don't bother to extend them common courtesy. I disarmed Milanench of his remaining weapon before magically pulling him closer and adhering his six trembling 'arms' to the counter with a series of sticking charms. "Why the difference?" I hissed at my droid. "I mean, why do you think that there will be a fight with no blood spilt?"

"Answer: Because you are the only creature in this building with blood, Master."

I refrained from groaning. I was going to have to be very careful with my phrasing, given HK-47's attitude. "Right. Well, it's time for you to translate. And please do it as literally as possible this time. I will tell you when you can indulge yourself, understand?"

"Supplication: Yes, Master. Of course, Master. Anything you say, Master."

"Wonderful," I growled in English. "Thousands of robot heads in this store, and I have to get the one that channels a psychotic house elf."

"Request: Do you have a question for the fat bug, or are you just going to wait for him to tear his limbs off his own body. So long as I can see, I'm good either way."

I glanced over at Milanench to find that it was indeed trying to wrench its legs from its body in an effort to escape. His many 'shoulder' joints were bulging alarmingly. "All right, ask him if he has your body."

"_Translation: Where's my body, bug?_"

The storekeeper clicked and warbled, still pulling mindlessly against my charms. Apparently he preferred to cripple himself rather than stay put.

"Translation: Get out, get out... someone help me... please have mercy... I beg you, leave me alone," HK-47 said in a monotone. "Observation: He didn't answer the question, Master."

I sighed and rolled my eyes. "Yes, I spotted that almost right away. All right, ask him again please, and feel free to add a mild threat this time."

"_Translation: Tell me where my body is or I'll smear the innards of every Harch on the planet all over your shop!_"

The storekeeper's rapid, high-pitched clicking changed to a low, staccato as its body started twitching uncontrollably.

"What's he saying now?"

"Advisement: He is screaming, Master."

"Screaming what?" I pressed.

"Qualification: Just… screaming. I assume my threat has overwhelmed its inferior fleshiness and reduced it to a blubbering ball of impure, watery slime. I suggest squashing it and selecting another bug at random to question. Oh, he has started making sense." HK paused for a moment, listening to the Harch click and warble. "Translation: Why are you doing this?"

"Tell him that I don't waste courtesy on people that threaten to kill me."

"_Warning: Threaten the Master and lose your head, meatbag!_"

Whatever HK said, it was effective. The Harch redoubled its efforts in trying to tear itself free, only to begin uprooting the counter; my sticking charms proving stronger than the furniture housing. A rhythmic, metallic clanking from towards the back of the store drew my attention.

A robot well over three metres tall was trying to make its way to the front of the store. Its progress was hampered both by the excess stock lying in scattered piles on the floor and the fact that one of its legs looked as though it was from a much shorter robot. Despite the difficulty it had moving, my eye was drawn to the enormous weapon it held. Sleek, black and imposing, it looked like a massive cannon.

"_HK_, what is that thing?" I asked, gauging my surroundings in preparation for a fight.

"Answer: I'm not sure. It does not resemble any _droid_ in my _databanks_. Contemplative: You'd have thought that after many _thousand_ years someone would have been able to improve on my design. If this is the best they have come up with I may just scrap myself out of despair."

I watched the massive metal robot almost lose its balance as it tried to clamber over the junk on the floor of the shop. As imposing as the figure was, its mobility troubles gave it a comical air. "If I remove the head, will that kill it?"

"Statement: I suspect that subjecting it to a mild breeze would be enough to kill it, Master. It has been assembled for intimidation rather than function."

"Fair enough," I said, raising my wand. With a deft horizontal slash, I cast, "Concidio!"

The cutting curse tore through the droid's neck with a shower of sparks. On either side behind the behemoth, crates and merchandise also split under the spell. The overly-small head fell from the body, crashing to the junk-strewn floor. Maybe five seconds later, the rest of the droid followed suit, resulting in a resounding crash.

"Observation: That is an effective voice-activated projectile weapon you have."

"Thank you," I said, eyeing the metal behemoth. I didn't want it to get up again, in spite of _HK-47's _assurances.

"Query: Does it have a similar effect on meatbags?"

"Of course."

"Challenge: Prove it."

Before I could so much as snort in response, Milanench collapsed as close to the floor as possible with three-quarters of his limbs stuck to a countertop. The Harch began screaming like a Geiger counter dropped in a nuclear reactor.

"Translation: The fat bug is telling you to take what you like and leave. Statement: I congratulate you on your negotiation skills."

I shook my head with a sigh. "Right, so how do we find out if your body is here if they can't even talk for their fear?"

"Answer: I'm sure the fat bug uses a _droid_ to maintain his inventory, Master."

"Well, ask him to send the _droid_ to you and you can talk to it."

_HK-47 _again spoke in that weird language. _"Demand: Get your inventory droid out here or I'll rip your legs off and stake you out on the ceiling with them_."

The Harch lifted one leg and flailed it desperately. I frowned, but noticed the droid who had tried to speak to me last time I was in the shop. It looked like Milanench was waving it over with his leg.

HK-47 and M9-R42 began a rapid fire conversation. I watched the Harch tremble with a sigh. I stepped over to the creature, noting that its clothes were stained in a way that suggested that, as noted by _HK-47_, the Harch had indeed voided some bodily waste. I picked up the bladed weapon and the gun. Both seemed to be of good quality, though were designed for hands larger than my own. Oh well, having extra weapons to sell never hurt. I tucked them into my belt. Milanench stretched out one trembling leg and fumbled at the back of the counter.

"Statement: The fat bug doesn't have my body, Master. To show our displeasure, can we engage in some unadulterated violence?"

"Would that get you a body any quicker?" I asked, leaning over the bench, wondering what the Harch was doing.

"Answer: No, but it would be fun."

"Let's not go about making more enemies than is practical, eh?"

_HK-47 _actually managed to produce a sulking tone to his speech. "Observation: A dead enemy cannot be counted a threat. This is a disturbing display of mercy, Master. I trust it will not be an ongoing habit."

I sighed. "Trust me _HK_, if you stick with me, you will get your fill of violence and killing."

"Commentary: Promises, promises," my droid muttered.

Milanench managed to hook his foot around something, and pulled out a drawer from the counter. There looked to be a large metal box of some sort within. The Harch pulled the drawer free from the counter and shoved it along the floor to me with a wild kick. He clicked and warbled, his pincers opening and closing.

"Translation: Take it, take it all. Just go. Leave me alone. Observation: It appears that with the right encouragement, these fat bugs can almost be accommodating enough to not warrant slaughtering indiscriminately."

I'd been conversing with my new companion long enough to get a feel for its personality. I waved my wand and levitated the metal box from the floor. "Really?" I asked dubiously.

"Answer: No."

A wand flick opened the box. Inside were several neat rows of credchips. I closed the lid, shrank the box and pocketed it. "Yeah, I didn't think so. Let's go and get you a body elsewhere," I said, releasing the sticking charms holding the Harch down. As Milanench scrambled backwards, I hit his retreating form with a confundus charm. He'd know that today had been a very bad day for him, but he'd be a bit hazy on the details.

I took my droid and made my way to the door. I debated leaving the muggle-repellent wards to evaporate on their own; it would give me a bit of a head start in getting away from the shop before Milanench sent some goons after me, but I had a real aversion to leaving magical constructs behind in the muggle world. Things tended to go wrong.

I glanced back into the store, to discover that I couldn't make out a single Harch, every one of the spidery buggers were massed together in a far corner of the ceiling, a hundred metres up or more. From the front door, it looked like a nest of baby spiders. Somehow, I don't think sending someone after me was on Milanench's mind. The storekeeper had managed to scale the height of the shop at a respectable clip.

I ripped down the wards and stepped through the door, back into the agoraphobia-inducing crowds.

Before I'd taken two steps, I flinched at a sound like someone tearing frozen electricity off to my right. The crowd surged in the opposite direction. I glanced towards the source of the noise. A robed figure holding a glowing green tube of light looked directly into my eyes.

The crowd behind the figure pushed back, giving him plenty of room, but turned and watched the proceedings curiously.

Bugger. When _criminals_ drew weapons on each other, Joe Public pisses off as quickly as possible and doesn't come out until the shooting stops. He only sticks around to watch when police are involved. I really didn't want to bother myself with law enforcement. As a group, they took themselves far too seriously.

Still, cops always had trouble keeping the peace in crowds, a fact that I'd used to my advantage on any number of occasions. I flipped my charmed hood up, ducked my head down and moved with the crowd away from the man with the glowing phallic symbol.

Another identical noise ahead of me heralded the appearance of a new figure; this one holding a blue light. He looked almost human; it was only the long, tall shape of his head that marked him as alien. The crowd split and surged around him like a rock in a stream. Despite my cloak's camouflage magic, this one stared directly at me as well.

Double bugger.

I stopped moving. There seemed no point in trying to hide, not when they could see my through my charm. I scanned the area, ranking possible exit paths by availability and crowd density.

The walkway outside of Milanench's shop was about fifteen metres wide. It was at a junction of ramps, one coming up from the level below, one coming down from the one above and a wide walkway stretching out hugging the front of the buildings. Out past the edge of the merged walkway junction, several lines of flying cars buzzed past in both directions.

The two light-holding figures basically blocked me from heading along the horizontal walkway in either direction. They did not appear to have any projectile weapons, and weren't anywhere near enough to try and restrain me physically. I took a few steps towards the ramp heading up when another flash of humming light appeared in the middle of that path.

"Right," I drawled, knowing without looking exactly where another light-wielding being would be. I turned and glanced at the ramp heading down. Yep, there she was.

The figure wore similar clothing and stood stock still in the middle of the remaining unblocked path. She detached what looked like a silver torch from her belt and held it in a two handed grip. A beam of green light emerged with that distinctive sound.

I looked around, more curious than threatened. These cops seemed to value style over substance. Muggle police often found it difficult to understand my level of disinterest whenever they confronted me. The ability to apparate did wonders for your confidence.

I wondered briefly if the different glowing colours had any significance.

The figure with the vertically bulging skull spoke. "_You will come with us_."

I looked down to the droid head under my arm. "_HK_? Who are these people?" I hissed.

"Observation: They are _jedi_, and they want you to go with them. I advise against using projectile weapons, Master. Stick to decapitating them from close range."

I blinked at the odd, yet familiar word. Hadn't the robot at the building I'd arrived at mentioned it? "_Jedi_? What are they?"

"Recitation: The ones holding _lightsabers_ are called _jedi_. They present themselves as the guardians of peace across the stars, but they've been the cause, or at least been a contributing factor, to almost all major conflicts. With a few notable exceptions, they are a pathetic waste of adequate combat skills."

My hissed conversation with _HK-47 _caused the quartet to share glances. "_Do you not speak Basic_?" the chatty one said in that unknown language.

"Translation: He wants to know if you are unable to speak the common language."

"So, they've got an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic entrance, decent powers of observation, but critical thinking isn't their strong suit. Do they have the right to detain me? Have I broken any laws?"

"Objection: Master, surely you don't bother yourself with such trivialities?"

I gave a small chuckle at that. "Not for some time now. I'm more interested in how they intend to force me to comply."

"Caution: The weapons of light they carry can cut through almost anything, Master. Even a _chassis_ such as mine."

I eyed the approaching figures with rather more caution than I'd previously held. It would explain why they appeared to be unarmed except for their short beams of light; weapons that could cut anything would certainly give you an advantage in a close fight. Of course, the ability to accidentally cut your own arm off if you so much as coughed or sneezed at the wrong time would make the health and safety policies regarding practicing a little more pressing.

I looked out over the glorious, bottomless vista filled with flying cars. "Can any of these species fly?" I asked, noting the four different, though uniformly humanoid, species.

_Chapter 6_

_"Advisement: Not unaided; please don't… _AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH _!"_

_Halfway through HK's advisement, I threw him over the edge of the walkway, then sprinted five paces and hurled myself off the edge after him. During the first few seconds, I spread my arms wide and arced gracefully through the air. As gravity took a firm hold, I pulled my arms to my side. Dropping head first like a stone, the wind whipped my hair and robes violently. My internal organs dropped, but my grin was firmly in place._

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: Thanks to my reviewers – OrionTheHunter, ahrondude, Naginator, Conu, hordac85, animekingmike, required-field, Raycheall Dionzeros, Beyogi, Uberlemming, gudik, IlikeComps, Beloved Daughter, Zealot of Reading, Nightbrainzz (x2), Iztiak, N1F3, I Judicator, luckykas, Lordban, kitsune of darkfire, metal.v2, Genericrandom, nano101, crobhdearg, Syithe, shiro-wolfman-k, killroy225, shugokage, darkangelmanz, Keeper of Storms, Nauro, jmsdragn, Nate88, Which Brew, Xyfa, GiantMonkeyMan, Alexeyy (x2), Orlok Tsubodai, Bahadur, terryie, Sorrowful Stone, Dirbatua, The Mad Mad Reviewer, Jedi Alex Colbent, The Tantalus Complex, otakuguy, jbfritz, tenchifew, dammyd, billybobbloac, Deicide73 and Tikitorch559. Wow, just… wow. Thanks all.

A short chapter, but longer ones are coming.


	6. Chapter 6

disclaimer type=standard

Anything you recognise is either JK's or George's. I dare say anything else belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

_I eyed the approaching figures with rather more caution than I'd previously held. It would explain why they appeared to be unarmed except for their short beams of light; weapons that could cut anything would certainly give you an advantage in a close fight. Of course, the ability to accidentally cut your own arm off if you so much as sneezed at the wrong time would make the health and safety policies regarding practising a little more pressing._

_I looked out over the glorious vista filled with flying cars. "Can any of these species fly?" I asked, noting the four different, though uniformly humanoid, species._

Chapter 6

"Advisement: Not unaided; please don't… _AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH _!"

Halfway through HK's advisement, I threw him over the edge of the walkway, then sprinted five paces and hurled myself off the edge after him. During the first few seconds, I spread my arms wide and arced gracefully through the air. As gravity took a firm hold, I pulled my arms to my side. Dropping head first like a stone, the wind whipped my hair and robes violently. My internal organs dropped, but my grin was firmly in place.

Such a move might well be career-ending, without having a method of flight available. Personally, I had at least four, and only two of those were illegal.

I'd once given a group of condescending base jumpers the fright of their lives when I'd jumped off a bridge without a muggle parachute. They'd drunk themselves into a stupor a few hours later, though I understand that at least two of them checked themselves into a sanatorium after I waved to them through their hotel window later that night. The room was on the fifth floor, so some leeway needs to be given.

My eyes streamed tears behind my glasses as I plunged passed rows of flying cars, trailing after a tumbling robotic head. Despite my relatively aerodynamic profile, air resistance and flapping robes did slow me down somewhat. HK didn't have the same benefits and was slowly falling away. I gripped my wand tightly, extended an arm and summoned him back to me.

"Exclamation: Master, you idiot!"

"Have some faith in me," I hissed back incomprehensibly; Parseltongue is difficult to speak when your lips are being subjected to winds nearing two hundred kilometres an hour. I gripped my wand in my teeth and reached into another pocket.

"Objection: Master, humans cannot fly!"

I pulled out my Firebolt, which instantly grew to its full length in my hand. I slipped one leg over and instantly ceased being a human being in life-threatening free-fall and became an ex-Seeker in the middle of a very sedate dive. I took my wand out from between my teeth and stuck HK to the broom handle with a charm. I let my wand slide into its sheath on my forearm and replied, "I disagree. Observe."

With that, I arced gracefully around and into a horizontal glide, casually slipping around, under or over flying cars that drifted too close. Despite the much advanced technology, none of the vehicles appeared to be travelling all that much faster than the cars on English motorways in the early 21st century. At least, those few motorways not part of the usual contra-flow.

"Astonished Query: What are we travelling on?"

"A broom. I had it in my pocket."

There was a long pause. "Observation: Sanity appears to be in diminishing supply in humans these days."

I laughed at that. "You're not the first to think so after meeting me."

"Supplication: Please give me some warning before you do something like that. My _circuits_ are not ready for such abrupt changes of circumstance."

I barked a laugh as I executed a barrel roll over the top of a flying car that looked like a convertible. The three-eyed creatures driving it almost lost control of the vehicle on seeing me. "Should I take it as a compliment that it's taken me less than a day to freak out a _droid_ that likes killing?"

"Statement: Embrace your delusions, Master. Oh, there appear to be _Jedi_ following us."

My mood dropped. I looked ahead to gauge how safe my current vector was before turning and looking behind. "Where?"

"Answer: There are some _speeders_ behind us that are communicating with each other. They have been following us since you jumped from the ledge."

I had no idea what a _speeder_ was, but there were three small vehicles flying in tight formation behind me – and the drivers were all wearing robes.

"How fast can those things go?" I asked, scanning ahead for an opportunistic distraction.

"Objection: It has been _a hundred_ human generations since I was last functional, I am not familiar with the performance capabilities of modern vehicles."

Once again, I dropped my wand into my hand. I cast disillusionment charms on myself and the broom. Re-holstering it, I again took hold of the Firebolt and flew inverted under a large vehicle, out of sight of the three pursuing Jedi.

I pulled back and dove, trusting that my transparency, the bulk of the flying lorry and my sudden vertical plunge would throw them off my trail. I performed a high-speed slalom through three lanes of traffic perpendicular to their flow, then took a hard right and flew between two buildings that had no aerial traffic between them. In less than ten seconds, I was several hundred metres below my previous position and heading is a completely different direction.

"Observation: The _Jedi_ are still following, Master. I suggest charging weapons."

I swore. "How are they following me? I'm all but invisible." I began to wish that _HK-47 _could speak English. The lack of swear words in Parseltongue made bleeding off frustration rather... frustrating.

"Advisement: Jedi can follow you using their minds, Master. They have no need to rely on their eyes."

I felt a sudden chill. "Mind powers? They're MAGICAL?" I shouted.

"Answer: A reasonable statement, given your primitive culture and limited understanding."

Sodding wonderful, I thought, ignoring the barely disguised insult. Well, there wasn't one wizard in ten thousand who could track apparition. Remus even once told me that it was impossible. Kingsley was the only living wizard I knew who had the skill, and he drove the Minister's desk these days. Well, the days I'd just left this morning.

He'd taught me the theory, but beyond those lessons, I hadn't really had the opportunity to apply the knowledge. Since leaving school, whenever I tracked my quarry, I'd paint them with tracer charms or use anti-apparition jinxes. That was much easier than attempting to arithmetically determine their escape destination. Let's see if these Jedi can do it. I slowed the broom to a standstill, picked a distant spot in the sky, and apparated there.

Despite what a great many wizards believe, apparition is not as easy as we were taught in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. The three D's cover how to actually force your body to perform an apparition, but in practice that only covers the skill required to travel a few steps to a hoop on the floor. The further you travel, the more things you need to compensate for.

Anyone who is not prepared for the difference in air pressure when apparating to a different altitude could end up with lungs crushed to the size of plums or inflated to the size of watermelons. I once side-along apparated a Hong Kong Triad member to the top of K2 without including him in my pressure bubble. It was interesting watching him try to stop his lungs from forcing their way out through his nostrils.

Apparating without compensation to a place more than a few tenths of a degree longitude or latitude away from your point of origin means you'd better lean on arrival, and arrive jogging if you travel any meaningful distance along a longitude line. Intercontinental apparition is impossible for all but the most powerful wizards, if only because the ability to adjust to arriving at a forty-five degree angle and compensate for the Coriolis effect is not included in the curriculum of magical schools. Apparating from London to Auckland involves having to turn yourself upside down, adjust your body's trajectory by several hundred miles an hour and protect your lungs from swelling. And that's without how you go about avoiding appearing in the middle of a muggle street. Most people just don't bother, not when international portkeys are made by people trained specifically to do those sorts of calculations.

Aerial apparition adds another layer of complexity to an already difficult discipline. When you're pulling a couple of G's and rotating at different rates in all three dimensions, calculating how to even those out and apparate to an unmoving spot on the ground takes the sort of mental arithmetic that most people with a sub-200 IQ find a little overwhelming. I've never really had a major problem with it, though that comes from my instinctive knack for flight rather than any affinity for mathematics. Still, it's much, much easier to just come to a halt before apparating, as it reduces the chance of splinching by a couple of orders of magnitude. And without knowing where I'd go to fix a splinching accident, I wasn't prepared to risk it.

I appeared at the same altitude about ten kilometres away. Keeping the disillusionment in place, I dove down to the dense cityscape, looking to lose myself in the urban maze.

After several minutes of high-speed manoeuvres which put me back into a much better mood, I slowed down to a speed that enabled me to speak Parseltongue without an atrocious accent.

"Are they still following us?"

"Answer: Certainly, Master."

I sighed. "Where are they?"

"Objection: My limited _sensor_ capability isn't enough to detect a small number of _encrypted_ _signals_ in the middle of _Coruscant_ unless they are also close enough for _visual_ identification."

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, feeling a headache coming on. "What?" I exploded. "Speak Parseltongue!"

_HK-47 _actually sounded annoyed. "Clarification: They are not close enough for me to find, Master."

"Then how do you know they're still following us?"

"Obvious Answer: They are _Jedi_."

I grumbled, "Wonderful," in English, but looked around for a suitable place to land. These _Jedi _apparently were a group of people with such a reputation for dogged determination that even _HK-47 _grudgingly admired them. I suppose I'd best make sure they didn't have a chance to follow. "Well, it's damned hard to track _apparition_, so I'll go with that," I said.

I touched down softly on a relatively deserted walkway deep down in the bowels of the city. The crowds didn't take any notice of a human-shaped shimmering in the air, a fact that suited me just fine. I found a space near a pile of rubbish where I could work.

I detached _HK-47_, shrank my broom and replaced it in its pocket. I hefted my droid head under my arm and concentrated, focusing on the corner of my warded den.

I appeared in the enlarged room with a soft implosion of air. Almost immediately, the entire room filled with dual agonised screams.

I had my wand out and aiming at a pair of robed females before I'd finished my swearing. Both were on their knees clutching their heads. They both appeared human - well, human-ish; I'd never seen another person on earth with pale green skin. Unless you include Hermione after our ride on Buckbeak to rescue Sirius. The other female looked much more like an Earth-human, with skin the colour of Italian coffee.

I stunned them both while they were down. Once I was sure they weren't getting back up and that no one was coming to help them, I slumped my shoulders and took a deep breath that turned into a massive yawn.

This was turning into a very, very long day. I'd probably been awake now for more than thirty hours. Battling for your life repeatedly tended to take the edge off fatigue while you were fighting, but over-charged your reserves accordingly once the danger had passed.

"Observation: Master, I appear to be experiencing some _temporal _and _spatial _instability. Since your idiotic leap I have found myself in different places without…"

"Spending the time to travel there?" I finished rhetorically.

"Answer: Yes, Master."

I waved my wand at the pair of stunned females, summoning their credchips, of which they had a surprisingly large number. "Don't worry, it's called _apparition_. When I _apparate_, I take us from one place to another using magic."

HK was silent for some time. "Query: Magic? Are you some sort of _Force_ user? Primitive meatbags have historically, not to mention regularly, mistaken _Force_ abilities for magic."

Satisfied with yet another moderate financial haul, I levitated the pair and floated them out the open door and into the rubble-strewn alley. "Normally, I'd say no. I've always called it magic. Is it possible that these _Force_ users are using magic and just call it something else?"

"Contemplative: That is unlikely. The _Force_ is measurable; practitioners have above average levels of _symbiotics_ in their _cells_. Magic by definition is not. You have demonstrated abilities too dissimilar from any displayed by the Jedi I have encountered. My creator was one of the most powerful Force users in history, yet he could not _apparate_, or carry a flight-capable vehicle in a pocket."

I smothered another yawn. It was time to find some place to have a kip. This bolt hole was compromised, and I seriously doubted that I'd be welcome at the Jedi building. That is to say, I wouldn't be welcome to leave.

I vanished my conjured furniture and took HK with me out of the door. "Do you know of anywhere we could find a safe place to sleep?" I asked as I released the expansion charms. The sudden collapse of volume caused a massive gust of air and dust to be ejected from my short-term lair, ruffling my hair and cloak. "Comfort would be a nice extra feature, but not necessary."

"Answer: There are many on this world. Pompous and cowardly meatbags from across the stars reside here; there are any number of places that cater to such pretentious weaklings."

* * *

It took a few false starts and some practice, but I managed to get the _speeder_ belonging to the pair of female Jedi started and heading in the direction HK indicated. My droid wasn't much help with the rules of the roa... er, air. He predictably suggested just blasting our way through the snarls and slow traffic.

"Statement: According to the public _holonet_ I can access, the building ahead with the gaudy entrances is called the _Intergalactic Hotel_. It caters to the parasitic meatbags who claim to be working in the interests of their pathetic slaves."

I couldn't help but smile at my droid's vitriol. I suppose that if I was paralysed from the neck down and unable to do anything but talk I'd be just as caustic. In fact, I seem to remember the school nurse commenting as such on more than one occasion. I directed the speeder towards an entrance that was remarkably empty compared with the others on different levels.

A droid painted in the same garish colours as the hotel's exterior bustled over to the speeder as I drew up. It babbled something at me in the language HK called _Galactic Basic_.

"_I am terribly sorry, but this entrance is currently unavailable_."

"Translation: All the other meatbags are using some other entrance. The wait time will be shorter here."

I nodded, moving past the hotel's droid. It squawked in alarm and raced around to stand in front of me again. "_Please good sir, I can escort you to the nearest available functional entrance_."

HK sounded resigned. "Translation: Be a good human and go to another entrance where you can wait with the rest of the _nerfs_."

I sidestepped the droid again and kept on moving. "I take it that wasn't a literal translation."

"Justification: I relayed the meaning of the message, Master. Some ideas do not convey themselves in literal translation."

"And what if, due to one of your accidental mistranslations, I ended up killing someone?"

"Insulted Indignation: Accidental!? Please, Master, give me at least some respect."

I took a deep breath. Yet more evidence that as useful as my _droid_ was, his creatively psychotic attitude would need very careful management. At least until I'd managed to learn this language that seemed to be common. I stepped through the entrance to find myself in the middle of a one-sided Mexican standoff.

"Exclamation: What!? That's it; I cannot withstand this humiliation any longer. Master, please scrap me immediately."

My eyes flashed over the scene, my mind a whirl with risk assessment and threat mitigation. Two dozen or so robots stood protectively arrayed around a thin, nose-less figure in iridescent robes. Despite the alien's, well, _alien _features, he looked smug; his hands clasped easily behind his back despite the myriad weapons arrayed around him.

The squad of droids were all identical, with deceptively thin limbs, a stout torso, and a bizarre neck/head that looked like a bent pipe. Each was armed with an identical weapon, one metal hand supporting the barrel, the other on the stock. Without exception, the weapons were pointed at an elaborately dressed human female.

The woman had her nose in the air, as though haughtiness was a replacement for armour. She had two bodyguards behind her, both frozen still with their hands on weapons that were pointed towards the floor. Around the main players in the unfolding drama were several small groups of aliens, almost all of which had their own security teams. A red-skinned chap with those head tentacles was almost having conniptions trying to get everyone to calm down. Everyone ignored him.

The smug alien ignored the hyperventilating fellow and spoke to the woman in _Basic_, his lower lip the only part of his mouth moving. "_I'm afraid I cannot let such slanderous comments pass, Minister_."

The woman replied, her voice tight with tension. "_Do as you will to me, Dod. My people will not suffer under the Trade Federation's invasion for long once the Senate_…" Her voice cut off as, with a wave of the ugly alien's hand, each droid's weapon began to hum ominously.

"_Lying again, Minister? I really can't have that. And it's Senator Dod, to you_."

"_HK_?" I prompted.

"Summary: The _Nemoidian_ with the appalling _droids_ is threatening the human for lying about him. I suppose you are going to do something stupidly and unprofitably heroic," _HK-47 _said, a sullen sneer in his tone.

I blinked. Maybe his previous owners had a saving-people thing that annoyed him, but I'd never in my life heard any snake able to put so much emotion into its language. "No, what you meant about wanting to be scrapped."

When he answered after a small pause, he sounded a little less acerbic than usual; almost… satisfied. "Statement: Oh. These _droids_ are atrocious. The fat bug's deplorable effort was insulting enough, but these execrable excuses are mass-produced. I cannot stand to see the degeneration of my perfection."

"Would it make you feel better if I destroyed them?" I asked, though I couldn't quite get the condescending tone I was after into my speech.

"Statement: Don't patronise me, Master; why would you bother?"

I shrugged. "I wouldn't. Not normally. But it doesn't look like we're going to get a room while this impromptu _theatre _production is going on."

HK perked up a bit. "Agreement: That is true. Then by all means, Master, wipe them out."

I shrugged, and took a step to the side, exposing the entrance. With a flick of my wand, I summoned the 'pathetic _droids'_ and banished out the door hard enough that they flew off the edge of the walkway and down into the vast depths of the city. They made oddly human shrieks of surprised panic as they flew past.

"There. Happy?" I asked _HK-47_.

"Objection: What was that? Where was the unadulterated violence? Where were the explosions? The rending of parts? The screaming? Where was the **fun**?"

I looked up to see the expression on the Nemoidian change. It was always fun to watch a bully suddenly come to terms with democratic equality. "I wasn't going to waste effort on _droids_ as pathetic as you made out," I said defensively. "Besides, the guy over there with the head tentacles looks like he's going to wet himself with relief, and the ugly one with no fashion sense looks to be contemplating his mortality." Actually, judging from the looks the nose-less chap was receiving, I was mildly surprised that he hadn't made a run for it.

Oh, there he goes.

"He runs well for a guy in a dress," I murmured.

"_Master Jedi! Thank you, thank you. Senator Dod was causing quite an incident. Thank you for your assistance. Is there anything I can do for you? Do you wish to speak to a client?_"

I sighed at the rush of unintelligible babble. "_HK_," I said wearily. "Ask him if we can have a room please."

* * *

"You threatened him, didn't you?"

"Objection: I most certainly did not!"

"Explain to me why he gave us this room then, and didn't ask for _credchips_."

"Observation: He mistook you for a J_edi_, Master. A Master _Jedi_, in fact. Offering you even a standard room would have been ungracious."

I looked around the room. It was a large room. A large room full of empty space in a city packed to the proverbial gills. It was the height of decadence to have all this wasted volume.

Mind you, the one-eighty-plus degree views of the city scape were impressive. The hotel was one of the taller buildings in the area, and the luxury suite took up half of the top floor. There were familiar things in the room, but even they were oddly out of place.

There was a crystal basin filled with what, after long moments of contemplation, I decided was the local equivalent of fruit. That was to be expected in a hotel of this class, but the basin was levitating at my elbow, and followed me around the room. There was a fishtank in the bedroom, if a perfect sphere of water hovering in mid-air could in any way be described as a tank. There were actual fish-like creatures in it, happily swimming about and occasionally sticking parts of their anatomy out of the water. One looked like it waved a fin at me. I studiously ignored it.

There were comfortable couches arrayed around an entertainment area – where a gorgeous woman explained in that common language the features of the room. Only she wasn't flesh and blood, she was a hologram.

Everywhere I looked, I saw things that had not existed just a day ago.

I rubbed my eyes wearily. I could work out what to do tomorrow. I drew my wand and set about setting up temporary wards on the door and the corridor outside. Once satisfied, I made my way to the bathroom, stripped, and stepped into the shower, taking only my wand, glasses and a potion vial. It contained a brew that would tempt NEWT students into killing to obtain a single dose, or at least raid their trust accounts.

It took a couple of tries to get the water flowing, and a bit of trial and error to get the temperature right. I stepped into the steaming stream with great relief, enjoying the sensation.

I stood under the water for a long time, letting my mind drift over the events of the past day. I felt myself get closer and closer to sleep, the warm water soothing the stress away.

Suddenly, over the sound of water drumming on my scalp I heard _HK-47 _shout, "Warning: Master! Intruder!"

I snatched my wand and glasses from the shelf in the shower and downed the potion. Instantly, my fatigue vanished as though I'd just slept for twelve hours. I wrenched the door to the cubicle open. Ron had been bemused at my habit of constantly being within arm's reach of both that potion and at least one of my two wands, but that very habit had saved my life at least three times in the past six years.

The intruder was waiting for me. Not preparing a trap, not holding a weapon; just... waiting.

A tall, powerfully built humanoid, he exuded menace. His midnight black clothes were tight around his wrists, ankles and waist, but billowed loosely in between, providing maximum concealment with minimal restriction of movement. A dark hood covered his head, leaving his face in deep shadow.

And here I was, dripping and naked, with nothing but a wand in hand.

Story of my sodding life.

_Chapter 7_

_The intruder's hands rose, fingers curling around the edges of the hood. He slowly pushed the material back, revealing a startling visage. Black and red tattoos covered every inch of exposed skin. A crown of short horns circled the being's hairless head. His eyes locked on mine, the irises sulfurous, edged in blood red. Once his face was exposed, he allowed his arms to fall back to his side. Other than that, he didn't move. At all. There was no slight swaying you usually saw in people as their bodies constantly balanced themselves. This being was as steady as a statue, his balance perfect. He was either a dancer or a warrior, and he really didn't look the type to slip on a pair of pink silk tights. An odd half-feral smile, half-smirk played on his lips; he seemed to expect his appearance to cow me._

_Meh. I've seen scarier._

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: Thanks to my reviewers - DaBear, Septon, KashikoiNekoHu, Outcaste, Nate88, jbfritz, shugokage, Which brew, metal.v2, chiva1989, Harry Uchiha Potter, killroy225, Nighrbrainzz, Genericrandom, tenchifew, Xyfa, Beyogi, Beloved Daughter, Angeldoctor, iota0000, ILikeComps, exaigon, Sorrowful Stone, Jonny Napalm, Mad Hamish, Arthorius, shiro-wolfman-k, Orlok Tsubodai Bahadur, Urfan, Zealot of Reading, wickedlfairy17, otakuguy, Iztiak, Lordban, Jman12394, Naginator, capctr, impatientuser, bukay, lordamnesia, Creepingdoom710, crobhdearg, Raychaell Dionzeros, Stop Staring At Me, unanimously anonymous. mostly, Rhynimy, Nauro, Knives91, timunderwood9, Duquette7 (x3), EgyLynx, BANE19, Memory25, Viktorius, Robin42069, Weeeeeeeeeeee, The elusive shadow, Lord Sia, cabale and a few guests. Bugger me.

A very special thanks to unanimously anonymous. mostly. Your reviews and PMs are marvellous food for thought. Thanks!

I have posted a companion fic (secondary fic? Slave fic?) to this one called "The Unsuspecting side of the Force". It is a series of scenes in this fic but from the perspective of other Star Wars characters. It is designed more to explain things rather than be a fic in its own right, but I didn't want to break up the first person perspective with third person bits and pieces.

Enjoy.

.


	7. Chapter 7

disclaimer type=standard

Anything you recognise is either JK's or George's. I dare say anything else belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

_The intruder was waiting for me. Not preparing a trap, not holding a weapon; just... waiting._

_A tall, powerfully built humanoid, he exuded menace. His midnight black clothes were tight around his wrists, ankles and waist, but billowed loosely in between, providing maximum concealment with minimal restriction of movement. A dark hood covered his head, leaving his face in deep shadow._

_And here I was, dripping and naked, with nothing but a wand in hand._

_Story of my sodding life._

_Chapter 7_

The intruder's hands rose, fingers curling around the edges of the hood. He slowly pushed the material back, revealing a startling visage. Black and red tattoos covered every inch of exposed skin. A crown of short horns circled the being's hairless head. His eyes locked on mine, the irises sulphurous edged in blood red. Once his face was exposed, he allowed his arms to fall back to his side. Other than that, he didn't move. At all. There was no slight swaying you usually saw in people as their bodies constantly balanced themselves. This being was as steady as a statue, his balance perfect. He was either a dancer or a warrior, and he really didn't look the type to slip on a pair of pink silk tights. An odd half-feral smile, half-smirk played on his lips; he seemed to expect his appearance to cow me.

Meh. I've seen scarier.

I gave my wand a lazy wave, drying myself in an instant. My magic use sent a shudder through my guest, and his eyes narrowed dangerously. With deliberate movements, he reached behind to the small of his back and withdrew a metal baton, a couple of feet long. Swinging through a slow arc, one end of the baton ignited with that distinctive sound, setting red-tinged shadows dancing around the room.

Okay, odds are he's not here to talk. I tossed a stunner at him. It was simple, effective more often than not, and how it was dealt with was a good indicator of skill.

The red blade of light swung impossibly fast to intercept and swat my spell away. The spell left a chrysanthemum mark on the wall.

Okay. Plan B.

I twirled the Elder Wand around my left hand, enveloping it in a dueller's shield and settled into a defensive crouch. If his lightsaber could deflect spells, I needed a shield strong enough to stop my own spells if he managed to send them straight back at me.

In the time it took to blink, the figure in black had closed the distance between us by half. The red lightsaber arced towards my head and I did the only thing I could think of.

I reached up to block the blade with my hand.

I'd done it before. Very few things instil a sense of caution among the enforcers for the Japanese Yakuza, but the ability to catch an enchanted katana with one hand without so much as getting a scratch is one of them. A dueller's shield created using the Elder Wand would hold out equally well against a magically sharpened blade or a barrage of spells for several minutes. It wasn't effective against multiple opponents, but in a one-on-one contest it was most useful.

The instant my dueller's shield met this blade of light however, my eyes widened in absolute shock. I could _feel _the glowing weapon burn through the magical shield like a chainsaw through wood. I had about a half second before I'd be (very briefly) holding a sword that could cut through anything in my unprotected hand.

I caught the briefest glimpse of an identical expression of shock on the red and black face before I shot an instinctive, adrenaline-fuelled blasting curse from my wand.

Point blank, that spell would disembowel any non-magical creature you cared to name; it would even give a Hungarian Horntail some major grief. Somehow, the assassin sensed it and twisted, no, _contorted_ his body away from the curse. It barely clipped his hip, but that was enough to send him spinning away.

The wall behind did not manage to survive so well.

I drew a shuddering breath, determined not to underestimate this creature. I cast three layered shields over my body before the black-clad figure landed on the far side of the room. Given the speed he'd displayed, I wasn't going to wait to react to his moves. In this battle, that was a plan for failure. I had to take the initiative.

With one spell, I banished three chunky chairs at him. Before they were even half way to their target, I began transfiguring the rest of the furniture in the room into attack Padfeet. It was a transfiguration spell I'd perfected through long practise and could cast with speed. The transfigured canines had been christened by Ron the first time he'd seen me use them in battle. Having dozens of pony-sized grims attack your opponents was an effective distraction, I can attest. Afterwards however, no matter how many times she tried, Hermione simply could not convince Ron that the plural of Padfoot wasn't Padfeet, and the idiotic name stuck.

I managed to create exactly two canine allies before my impromptu furniture missiles were suddenly filling my field of vision. The bastard had banished them back at me!

I repeated the banishing charm, blasting two of the three chairs back again like some perverse game of tennis. Unable to cast a third banisher in time, I ducked under the last chair, down on one knee. That move left me in a wonderful position to see Tattoo-face blur around the room. He ended up next to me before I could breathe and swing that blasted lightsaber down directly on my neck.

My shields held up under the humming blade long enough for me to apparate.

I appeared behind him in time to see the being shudder with pain as the glowing red blade sank into the floor beneath where my head had just been. I took aim and shot an entrails-knotting hex at his unprotected back.

Another red blade appeared from the other end of his lightsaber, and flicked the spell away.

My heart skipped a beat. Shit! The bastard hadn't even looked! He'd deflected a spell cast point blank - _by instinct_! Not even _Riddle_ could do that!

At the far edge of my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of a large, white object loom before feeling it smash into and buckle what remained of my shields. Though my magical protections bled off most of the momentum, they failed to stop it completely. I gave an involuntary grunt as the air in my lungs was forcibly expelled and I was thrown to my left. I landed hard. The object turned out to be the solid stone dining table, which finished its travels on top of me, pinning my wand shoulder.

Thankfully, it the handful of seconds since I'd created them, the dogs had finally caught up with Black 'n' Red. For some reason, despite their threatening growls, he ignored them. Right up until they sank their teeth into his limbs. One latched onto his left leg, the other onto his right arm.

His expression of surprise barely lasted as long as it took to blink. Even before the shock had worn off, he was countering the attack. Using his left hand, he swung his weapon in a glowing arc and cleft the dog on his leg in two. He then turned the second blade on the remaining dog, twisting his arm to get a better angle. In that instant, I had the best opportunity to hit him with a spell.

Unfortunately, with my wand arm restricted by the table, I couldn't use a curse or hex that needed a wand movement more complicated than a jab. And in the time it would have taken to shove the table away, my window of opportunity would have closed.

I cast the finger-removing jinx.

The simple spell had been around since the Founder's era, though it was not now taught at Hogwarts. I'd found it in the library at Malfoy Manor a year or so before the Weasleys moved in. That expedition had been quite profitable. The room under the drawing room floor had more dark stuff in it than I expected, and most of it useful.

The jinx clipped the figure just after he'd decapitated the second attack dog. Ten digits went spinning away from his hands, and his lightsaber fell from his 'grasp', carving deep, molten grooves in the stone floor as it landed and bounced.

Once again, his look of surprise lasted far less time than I hoped. With a gesture from a now-fingerless hand, the double-bladed weapon levitated off the ground and zoomed straight at me, a perfect, spinning circle of whirring dismemberment. And I was still limited by what spells I could cast.

"Impedimentia!"

The sword slowed as though I'd hit the brakes, and fell straight down to the floor. I jammed the tip of my wand to the tiles and quickly transfigured several tentacles that sprouted from the floor to grow around it, locking the blasted weapon out of the fight.

I felt a brief sensation of freedom as the table holding me down was flung aside, only to watch as a foot connected with my right wrist, sending the Elder Wand flying. I didn't take the time to swear before I tried rolling away, but the foot reversed its momentum and arced back. The heel connected sharply with my cheek, and my head snapped back and to the side.

The blow scrambled my sense of balance and set stars dancing in my vision, but I'd lived in the same house as Vernon and Dudley Dursley for years. I could take a blow to the head better than most.

I swung my own legs around, trying to kick my assailant's leg out from under him. They met no resistance whatsoever.

Pain erupted in my gut, forcing me to sit up involuntarily. My vision returned enough for me to see his knee in my belly. He'd jumped my kick and landed on me.

Fingerless hands scrabbled briefly at my neck for a second before he realised that it was difficult to throttle someone when you had no fingers. He drew his right arm back, palm up, ready to strike.

That tiny mistake gave me the opportunity to respond. I was no stranger to physical combat, and I didn't fight fair. I grabbed a double handful of his loose clothes and pulled him forward, slamming my forehead into his nose. The muscles in his chest beneath my knuckles felt like steel plates.

Pain erupted in my cheek as our heads connected; his kick had probably fractured the bone. I instinctively raised my left elbow high, which deflected his right hand enough to miss my face.

The edge of his left hand crashed like a cricket bat into the ribs under my right arm. Air whooshed from my lungs as I felt them crack. The only reason they didn't snap completely was because I was bent over to my right with my left elbow up high.

Bugger me, this wasn't good! He was bigger, heavier, stronger and faster. In a close fight, despite my better-than-average ability to take physical punishment, I was well and truly outmatched. This fellow was no amateur in the martial arts; from what I'd seen, without my wand and a decent distance between us, he could mop the floor with me.

That left magic I could do wandlessly. Like most trained wizards, outside of accidental magic, that is a woefully short list. Apparition, occlumency, legilimency and the animagi transformation were about it. I still had a grip on him, so I apparated, dragging the tattooed bastard along with me.

He'd flinched when I'd spelled myself dry before the fight, and he shuddered when I'd apparated away from his decapitation attempt. He may have been a magical Jedi, but my magic seemed to affect him badly.

Being side-along apparated didn't agree with him at all.

He stiffened, jaw clenched tight. Blood from his broken nose stained his lips, which were drawn back from his discoloured teeth in a feral snarl of repressed pain.

I took the opportunity to drive my knee into his groin as hard as I could. Even the toughest male is a mite delicate in that area.

He barely acknowledged the blow; he simply shoved his right palm into my chest, pushing me away. It was an unconscious, even instinctive movement. Had he been thinking, someone of his skill would have palm-struck at my solar plexus rather than relatively gently push my sternum. Still, the ribs under my right armpit shrieked in pain.

We drifted apart and began to fall in earnest.

I watched his expression change from a jaw-clenched grimace to surprised panic.

In two seconds, we'd dropped about thirty metres.

Still, it looked to be more than a mile to the higher walkways from where I apparated us, directly outside the window of the penthouse suite.

For some reason, the thought that came first to my mind was how cold it was to be naked and free-falling through the brisk night air. It's odd how the mind works. I suppose that if my animagus form had no wings, I'd have been panicking just as much.

My ears were assaulted by noise as we fell past the first line of flying vehicles. The cars swerved around us in a cacophony of beeps, toots and blaring honks. My attacker appeared to recover his wits and reached out one arm to a yellow, open-top vehicle in the next line below us.

It suddenly spun sideways and shot out of alignment, positioning itself under us.

I concentrated, and apparated across the couple of yards separating us. I caught a hold of his flapping hood with one hand and slapped my free hand on the back of his head, accidentally impaling my palm on one of the horns.

I ignored the pain and apparated us past the vehicle and accelerating our descent. Bastard wasn't going to get away from me that easily. He was going to hit the ground so hard he could be on a Goblin menu as a pancake.

He batted my arms away and aimed a kick at my side. I got my elbows down in time to protect my injured ribs, but he still sent me spinning away, grunting in pain.

We flashed passed the next row of cars in a blur, coming ever closer to terminal velocity.

I could see the panic on his face as his eyes darted around looking for something, anything he could do to save himself.

The last line of cars blurred past, and we were below the aerial roadways. Beneath us a lattice of walkways approached in a very terminal way.

I could spot the exact instant that he accepted his death. The red-edged yellow eyes lost their desperation, expressing nothing but diamond-hard determination. He threw his arms out towards me, and I suddenly couldn't draw breath. Insubstantial fingers gripped my neck, crushing my throat.

Sod that.

Once again, I apparated to just above his head and slammed my foot down. The invisible pressure around my throat disappeared, but he somehow managed to clamp his palms on my extended leg like a vice long before my kick connected. With a mighty twist, he hurled me down, attempting to slow his own descent to a survivable speed at the expense of increasing my own.

It wasn't close to being enough.

I tumbled down, somersaulting around so my legs were facing down. I didn't have time to transform; the walkway was coming up too quickly. I could see the crowds below scattering. I concentrated fully on what I was about to do.

A fraction of a second before impact, I apparated to the walkway using the same adjustments to my velocity that you use when apparating to a different latitude. I magically slowed my speed down to as close to zero as I could estimate. I still landed hard, bending my knees all the way to a crouch so deep that my exposed scrotum nearly kissed the concrete. Even through my adrenaline-flushed system, my unshod feet protested at the abuse. My ribs and bruised organs joined in. But I ignored it all to snap my head back and look up. I was just in time to catch one last glimpse of a pair of shocked, yellow eyes.

The black-clad figure slammed into the walkway to the distinct sound of snapping bone. The shock wave washed over me even as I rose from my crouch.

Yeah, bastard wasn't getting up.

My ears finally reported that several peop-, er, several beings were screaming around me. I let my eyes flick around the astonished crowd. Quite a few individuals were loudly doing whatever it was their species did when they were in shock, but the majority were silent and open mouthed. More than one stared at me, looked up at the distant cars above, and then back to me.

Play it cool, Potter, I told myself. You're starkers and you've just dropped out of the sky. Act natural. Muggles who've never seen real magic before can almost always convince themselves that what they saw could not have happened if you act as though it's an everyday occurrence.

As confidently as my injuries would allow, I strode over to the tattooed warrior. My eyes widened in surprise as I saw his eyes flicker and slowly open. Damn, he's tough. He was alive after hitting concrete at a respectable fraction of terminal velocity. From his crumpled, partially compacted form, it looked as though he tried to land feet first too, without the benefit of reducing his speed.

Ouch. That'd hurt.

The unfocused yellow and red irises sought out my face. Even though his life force hung by barely a wisp of fog, his eyes revealed nothing but hatred towards me.

I gingerly knelt down on one knee beside him, noting that both his arms were bent and twisted at unnatural angles. I stared directly into those evil eyes and whispered, "Legilimens."

Anger. Loathing. The creature's mind was a cesspool of evil. Whoever had taught him his skills had done so with a technique that was all stick and no carrot. There was no sense to the images, no cohesion. Blue lightning. A gentile face. Clashing crimson. Unending pain.

He was a weapon crafted for one purpose. To kill. Whoever pulled this puppet's strings possessed a living, breathing, sentient Killing Curse that would stop at nothing to carry out his orders. But despite his purely physical abilities, his mind was as well trained as a master Occlumens. It was only his mortal injuries that allowed me such ease of access.

The past hour was the most vivid. It usually was. But what shocked me was the ease with which this being had tracked me down. He could feel my magic usage from across the planet.

I pulled my consciousness out of his mind with a sense of relief. Despite having been dripping wet just over a minute ago, I felt like I needed another shower. A long one.

"_Excuse me? Master Jedi_?"

I looked up to see a human man offering me a cloak. I didn't understand any word he said except for 'Jedi'. Presumably he thought I was one. I inclined my head and smiled, hoping that would be a universal gesture of thanks, and accepted the garment. I threw it around my shoulders and drew it closed across my chest. Modesty was pretty much a lost cause at this point, but being covered made things a little less distracting for others.

My assailant gave a sort of weak cough, spattering blood over his chin and clothes. With a wheezy shudder, he lay still. His eyes faded in colour, still open and focused on something only he could see. The vivid sulfur-yellow on crimson irises darkened, leaving the dead eyes looking a far more normal shade of dark brown. Whatever power kept his eyes looking like a vision of hell had fled upon his demise.

I reached out and closed his eyelids.

In the distance, I could hear the dreaded siren that signalled the imminent arrival of some pompous individuals who were going to Ask Questions and damn-well expected to Get Answers. They tended to ask the sort of questions I had no intention of answering. Considering the size of the city, their response time was impressive, I'd give them that.

I quickly patted the cooling corpse down, looking for any hidden weapons, identification, cash, car-keys, a signed manifesto of his evil plans - anything useful. Around one wrist I felt a metallic bracer that had been deformed slightly by the impact with the ground. I slipped that over his smashed hand. In the sash around his waist, there was a palm-sized object, likewise damaged. I grabbed that too.

I rose from my crouch and looked down on the corpse. I could take it away with me to examine later, but instincts honed by years of dealing with the fallout from public displays of magic told me to just go.

These people seemed to hold Jedi in quite high regard. My feats of magic had so far been assumed to be Jedi abilities. I dropped the cloak off my shoulders and apparated away, arriving in the wrecked penthouse apartment. I scanned the room, feeling very unmotivated as I catalogued the carnage.

"Query: Master, did you kill the _Sith_?"

I probed my ribs with my fingertips and a wince. My injuries were quite extensive, if not debilitating. "Yes. Is _Sith_ an insult? Or is it the name of the creature?"

"Clarification: Negative. That creature was a _Zabrak_. A _Sith_ has similar abilities to a _J__edi_, but they have a much more pragmatic view of power."

I nodded, but ignored my _droid_ for the moment. Locked to the floor by solidified tentacles of transfigured stone was the scarlet lightsaber, both humming blades still active. Loud, confused noises outside the front door proved that the muggle-repellent charms were still working just fine. One wall between rooms within the penthouse was all but demolished from my blasting curse. The dining table was lying across the main living area where it had last been thrown. Some ruined chairs were lying around in pieces. Bits of transfigured attack dogs lay twitching as the magic that created them slowly dissipated.

Right, first order of business was to release the lightsaber and shut it off. Stubbing your toes would be the worst of your worries if you walked across the blades.

"I think we need to find somewhere to hide for you to give me a much better understanding of this world," I said as I retrieved the Elder Wand and set to work.

The lightsaber came free of its restraints easily, but I picked it up with exaggerated caution. It was trivial to work out how to deactivate the two beams of seemingly solid light. The weapon itself was rather heavier than I expected, but an in-depth study could wait until I'd fixed everything else.

"Agreement: Absolutely, Master. I would much prefer to be owned by someone not likely to end his brief existence in an embarrassingly obvious way."

I ignored the barb and flicked my wand around, liberally dispensing repairing charms. The deep, molten scores the assassin had left in the floor, the large, vacant area where an interior wall used to be, the chairs and table; all were returned to as-new condition and to their original positions. I've said it before and I'll say it again; magic is damned useful.

"Uncertainty: Er, Master, according to my _sensors_, the room just repaired itself."

I sighed. The potion I'd taken focused your mental faculties, but didn't do anything for physical weariness. "Yes, I told you. I'm a wizard. I use magic. Magic can repair things." I cast a couple of diagnostic charms on my chest and abdomen, wincing at the results.

"Statement: I had assumed that you were simply insane. It seemed the most probable explanation."

Yet another yawn escaped me, this one causing jagged shards of lancing pain across my ribs. "Ugh, I need a potion or twelve," I said in English. I was a better than average field healer, less from natural talent than constant usage. I could heal the internal damage, but it would take time, and I'd be limited in both movement and magic during the process. Potions would be better here. I summoned my potion belt and ran my finger over the bumps, searching for the necessary doses.

"Observation: That was your native language, I assume."

"Yes," I hissed back, sliding a couple of specific vials out of their homes. I held my nose as I downed the pungent concoctions. It didn't help with the taste all that much, but I'd take drinking something that tasted like delicately seasoned sewage over sleeping with cracked ribs and organ damage. After an involuntary shudder, I continued, "I will teach you later. Right now, I have to add some more protections, cast some healing magic and go to sleep." The medicinal potions flushed the other potion from my system, hitting me with a day and a half of mental fatigue in half a second.

A chime sounded at the door.

I rolled my eyes. "Of course. That'll be the landlord to evict me because of the noise," I groaned.

A humanoid _droid_ painted with a hotel uniform opened and entered the front door, flanked by a pair of non-uniformed _droids_ that just screamed 'security'. The leader of the trio spoke in Basic, pausing occasionally as its head turned from side to side.

_"Master Jedi, sensors have reported… structural damage… to the room. We have received reports of weapon discharges and… do you require assistance?"_

I wasn't sure if a _droid_ could be surprised, but I sure as hell got that impression. HK responded for me, presumably answering the _droid's_ questions. "_Observation: Any structural damage appears to be limited to your sensors._"

The three _droids_ seemed to be expecting to find something, judging from their constant head movements. I suppose that the initial wall removal would have been noted at the time. I'm glad the dust had settled with my spellwork.

"_Please forgive the intrusion_," the colourful droid said, before turning and leading its companions from the room. The door hissed closed behind them. Good riddance.

"Query: Master, is your life always like this?"

I closed my eyes and swayed with fatigue and a sudden absence of adrenaline. "Usually."

"Supplication: Master, please get me a body soon. Following you while able to carry weapons will be so much fun."

I sank down onto one of the pieces of furniture that sort of looked like couches. The smooth, leather-ish covering was gloriously soft. I sank deeply into it and gave a great deal of consideration to just letting myself lapse into slumber.

But this place wasn't as safe as I'd hoped. Passive wards were not enough. I rubbed my eyes to try and rid myself of some of the weariness. It didn't work. I really needed to set up some more protections before I went to sleep. And if these Sith and Jedi could track my magic usage down, even apparition wouldn't keep me safe.

I needed to hide my magic usage. There were ways to keep things hidden from magical sight, but I had no way of knowing if they'd work against these Jedi and Sith. not that it mattered, I was almost done in, and they were my best bet. At least until I had HK repaired and he could be armed.

Was it right to use a male pronoun? Ah, who cares, it fit.

I'd prefer to fight off a dozen Imperius Curses than get off that delightful couch, but I groaned and stood.

I spent a long half hour placing wards around the room, based on the Egyptian tombs Bill Weasley was always going on about. The Pharaohs had hidden their burial locations from all other magical scrying. If tracking magic was easy, then I had to do something, and hiding an area from magical sight sounded the most logical. Not that I had a choice at that point. I was about to crash, and there was little I could do to stop it.

_Chapter 8_

_Sixteen blessedly quiet and combat-free hours later I dragged myself from the large bed. I spent a couple of moments recalling the events of yesterday, and after the urge to gibber uncontrollably receded, I set about making plans. I cleaned my clothes and dressed._

_o_ooo000ooo_o_

AN: I can't get over the reaction to this story. I'm glad you're all enjoying it. Thanks to all my reviewers - I'd list you out by name, but that would seriously add to the word count. I really, really appreciate it.


	8. Chapter 8

disclaimer=standard

Anything you recognise belongs to JK or George. Anything else probably belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

Previously:

_I spent a long half hour placing wards around the room, based on the Egyptian tombs Bill Weasley was always going on about. The Pharaohs had hidden their burial locations from all other magical scrying. If tracking magic was easy, then I had to do something, and hiding an area from magical sight sounded the most logical. Not that I had a choice at that point. I was about to crash, and there was little I could do to stop it._

**Chapter 8**

Sixteen blessedly quiet and combat-free hours later I dragged myself from the large bed. I spent a couple of moments recalling the events of yesterday, and after the urge to gibber uncontrollably receded, I set about making plans. I cleaned my clothes and dressed.

I was quite good at the spell. Classically, it's said that necessity is the mother of invention. But it's also the big sister of improvisation. Six years of not having house elves launder your robes is a good motivator to learn a good quick 'n' nasty charm that did an acceptable job in getting your clothes clean. Well, less dirty. Hey, I'm a bachelor, no one expects any more than that.

My long-neglected stomach insisted that I brave the fruit in the hovering bowl. The flavours were incredible, ranging from eye-wateringly bitter to gaggingly sweet. Even Dumbledore would have been hard pressed to eat those. But there were fruits that ranged within those extremes and were palatable, even tasty. I ate my fill while pondering on my changed circumstances.

Knowledge was what I needed most. I wasn't just a fish out of water, I was a fish trying to play quidditch. If I was going to be stuck here for an extended period of time (perhaps even perpetually, though my mind shuddered at the thought) then I needed to acclimatise myself.

First things first. I was a wizard, so I needed to know what HK knew about magic, or the Force as he called it.

After an hour or so of grilling, I was beginning to question whether or not I was in the future at all. Maybe I was in some sort of different world. If this was the next great adventure, as Dumbledore described it, then that could well explain why I couldn't summon him.

The evidence for being in a different world was compelling. The Force seemed well understood as a phenomenon, though there were mysteries regarding its origin. And its sentience too, if HK was to be believed. While some aspects were similar to magic, others were wildly incompatible. I would be the first to admit that I was woefully ignorant of the deeper mysteries of magic, but I wouldn't have thought magic would evolve over time. Even if it did, it was unlikely to shed useful abilities and keep useless ones in order to develop others.

I was inclined to believe my droid. By his own admission, HK had been owned by two extraordinarily powerful Jedi. His usual derogatory rhetoric was put aside for the sort of admiration that parents show for gifted children. He had been present for and had observed some incredible displays of power.

The problem with the New World Hypothesis was that I could still use magic. If I was in a place where magic was different, why could I continue to use it as I had always done? It was a bit of a bugger. I resolved to explore the differences between the Force and magic further.

The similarities were interesting. The discipline HK called telekinesis sounded as though it could be mimicked quite easily by combining levitation, banishing and summoning charms. Divination seemed to be just as unhelpful through the Force as through magic, only really helping to understand events as or after they passed, rather than predict them.

Some things were far more versatile with magic than the Force. While something called Sith Alchemy could produce a number of elixirs with various, mainly deleterious effects, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of times as many potion recipes in just the seven standard textbooks for Hogwarts' students.

Other subjects were the opposite – more versatile through the Force than through magic. The mind arts were well represented here. A Jedi could create meaningful illusions; illusions that could be seen, heard, touched and even smelled. A Jedi could read thoughts, view memories, implant suggestions, force compliance, or any of a million other things. And while there were magical charms and curses that did much of that, I got the impression that magic was more of a blunt instrument compared to the Force in that area. Implanting images and manipulating dreams, something that took Riddle months with Legilimency, could apparently be done now with the wave of a hand.

I resolved then and there never to delve too deeply into a Jedi's mind. Not unless they were distracted by being on the verge of death.

Jedi could also use the Force to enhance their bodies, making them faster, or stronger, or their vision better. Potions and enchanted items could do that too, but the Force just made it seem so easy.

The one single power that a Jedi had that was unknown to magic was that of battle precognition. Not divination exactly, but knowing what move your opponent was going to make in a fight. That stood out to me as being the single most useful ability I could imagine.

But after our long discussion, I had to give magic the edge over the Force. It may be parochial, but I just had to – simply due to the variety and scope. I could do things with magic before I started school that were apparently unheard of to the Jedi and Sith. Apparition baffled my droid, though he positively gushed at the possibilities it lent to killing people in unexpected and gruesome ways. Despite the limitations of the language we were forced to use, I got the impression that it was technologically possible to transmit information instantaneously over vast distances. Transporting _matter_ over that same distance was a very different... matter... as it were.

Transfiguration was so incomprehensible that even after demonstrating the discipline to HK he still expressed doubts. Time travel, even just backwards a couple of hours, apparently broke all sorts of physical laws. As did expansion and shrinking charms. Conjuring and vanishing items actually caused him some distress – supposedly the amount of energy within even tiny amounts of matter would be enough to level the entire surrounding city block if it was annihilated.

Nice to know. I wonder why that was never covered in the safety briefings at Hogwarts. Ignorance, most likely. Mad-Eye would probably never have stopped his 'losing a buttock' lectures if it were known that a simple conjuration could wipe out the City of London.

Still, I felt a bit better, or at least more informed, after our little chat. I'd have to experiment with magical shields to see which would work best against a lightsaber, of course. But on the whole, I felt more confident that the next time I encountered a Jedi or sith, I'd put on a better performance.

As for HK, he hadn't spent the time I'd slept idly surfing for robotic pornography.

"Statement: I have done what research I can, limited to the public _holonet_. It appears that no _civilian_ _droid manufacturer_ uses any design that meets my requirements."

That didn't sound promising, even without understanding the gibberish he spouted in the local lingo. "So you can't use these modern _droid_ bodies?"

"Answer: Negative. One would assume that _a hundred_ human generations would advance _cybernetic_ design well beyond my original capabilities, but this does not seem to be the case."

"All right, do you remember how to build your body? I mean, do you keep the plans for your body in your memory?" Parseltongue really was a right bugger to talk technically with.

"Answer: Negative. The memory in my head only stores my _translation _and_ communication protocols_ and my _audio-visual_ memory. My _schematics_ and _protocols _for _combat_ and _assassination _were stored in high-security memory in my chest."

I didn't catch half of that, but I suspected that even if HK had answered in English I wouldn't necessarily have understood. "Well, where were you created? Maybe your designs will still be there."

HK was silent for a moment. "Calculation: A low probability. Too much time has passed."

"That wasn't what I asked," I snapped. Why did people second-guess me all the time?

"Answer: I do not know where I was created, but there was a manufacturing facility on _Telos_ that mass produced inferior _droids_ that were based on my design."

"Well, if I'm going to find a way home, I need to do research. To do that, I need to learn about this time. Travelling around will let me do that. We may as well go there and see if there are designs there and if they are compatible. An inferior body is better than no body. How far away is this _Telos_ place?"

"Answer: _Telos_ is a world many _parsecs_ away. Depending on the capabilities of the vehicle you claimed from the _Trandoshan_, it will take many days to get there."

I blinked. "Hang on, what? _Telos_ is a world? As in, a whole new world? Going around a different sun? The vehicle belonging to that lizard fellow is a, a _spaceship_!?" I exclaimed, the last word in English.

"Clarification: What is a _spaceship_?"

"I, er, well, a vehicle that can travel between stars," I replied, struggling a bit for coherent thought.

"Affirmative: Then yes Master, it is a _spaceship_. Is that surprising?"

What could I say? Sorry HK, in my time the only people able to go into space were obscenely wealthy tourists or employees of government-backed space exploration agencies? That humans had got as far away from the planet as the moon? That we'd not, as far as I was aware, ever made contact with aliens? Now, apparently criminals who don't think twice about shooting someone who bumped into them and spilled their drink in a bar can own a ship with the capability to travel between stars.

My shock suddenly turned into a thought that had me grabbing the arms of the chair to steady myself. I didn't have much in the way of assets here, and while I had no moral objection to stealing, without knowing the capabilities of the local cops it was probably better to do things legitimately. At first at least. "HK, is there a large trading culture between the stars?"

"Answer: Oh yes, Master. The worthless meatbags that infest this world would starve within weeks were it not for the enormous amounts of food imported from off world."

"Well then, is it profitable? Are there goods transported from here to this _Telos_? Could we buy things here that would fit through the door of my _spaceship_? Things we could then sell on Telos?"

"Answer: Undoubtedly. Though the return is minimal with so many competing _spaceships_ vying for work."

A wide grin spread over my face. "What if the ship could carry _a thousand_ times its usual capacity? Or even more. And without adding any more weight?"

HK's voice changed subtly. "Calculation: Assuming limited extra _expenses_, we would have access to potentially limitless _credits_. I approve, Master. Scanning _holonet _for suitable _cargo _now."

* * *

We left the hotel and headed off into the city without bothering the red-skinned fellow. He would no doubt have questions, and it would have been rude to simply not answer them. Better not to give him the chance in the first place.

There were uncountable places for a spaceship to land on this world, but HK had managed to track down the specific one through what he called the _holonet_. It took us the better part of three hours to get there on the various public, flying trains. Not even the London tube had so many stains and smells contained in one place. Well, maybe except for the Circle line on a Saturday night after the usual tourist pub crawls.

We made our way past the officious officials. My first sight of my spaceship did not give me the expected shiver of delight. I experienced a shiver, all right, but it came at the thought of actually flying in the bloody thing.

"What a heap of shit!"

"Query: Is there a problem, Master?"

I gestured wildly at the ugly, blocky monstrosity parked in front of me. "That thing doesn't look as though it would hold together in a stiff breeze, let alone a trip between the stars!" I hissed. "How does it fly without bits falling off?"

"Statement: _Aerodynamics_ is only of concern to those yet to have encountered the concept of _shielding_, Master. Though I share your opinion, this is a truly abominable specimen of vehicle design."

Abominable was an apt term. It looked like it had been hastily put together out of gigantic Lego blocks pressed out of solid rust. It looked as likely to fly as a lorry. Well, an unenchanted lorry, clarified to myself. I had inherited the motorbike Sirius used to fly around on after all.

Speaking of, I think I'll use it from now on to fly around here. It would probably attract less attention than a wooden broomstick. It took a bit more preparing than just pulling out my broom, but anything that drew less attention was a good thing.

I wandered around the outside of the monstrosity. Whoever designed it belonged in a home for the mentally disturbed, in my opinion. It was only by spotting what could only be the engines that I managed to work out which way it was supposed to fly.

A hiss of compressed air caught my attention. I turned to see a pair of doors outwards and a ramp within extend like some sort of mechanical tongue. I moved over to the opening, causing a yelp of alarm from a creature at the top of the ramp.

It looked like a midget with a giant, mousey helmet. It burbled in alarm and took off back into the bowels of my ship.

"HK, what was that?" I demanded.

"Answer: A Sullustan, Master. A species renowned for being even squishier than an average human, as difficult to believe as that is."

"Really?" I hissed with as much cynicism as I could manage. "However do they manage to survive to adulthood while being so weak? Do they have any strengths?"

"Answer: Sullustan meatbags are somewhat more adept at planning out routes between the stars than most," he responded, as though dragging a compliment out of him was an Olympian feat.

I grimaced. "Well, at least we know how to get on board," I grumbled. I carefully moved up the ramp, expecting an attack.

It didn't come. The interior of my spaceship smelled odd; a mixture of biological and technological smells that wasn't grotesque, but was unpleasant. I followed the frightened burbling to the front of the spaceship, where the Sullustan was busy ripping things from a locker and stuffing them into a bag. It held up two hands and squealed something at me.

"Translation: Please don't hurt me. I am leaving. Suggestion: Interrogate this meatbag, Master. His presence aboard your spaceship demands it."

I looked the creature over. It was shorter than nearly every other species I'd seen. Despite my parents' stature, I was only a little over average height. A fact I blamed on my upbringing and the main way I emotionally blackmailed Dumbledore's spirit into answering my questions. Every other individual I'd encountered on Coruscant was at least six feet tall – though using that measurement was probably invalid, given the variety of feet out there. I could actually look down at the Sullustan.

I noodled around in a pocket and extracted a small object the size of a child's top. I placed it down on a checker-patterned round table and ordered, "Ask him what he's doing here."

The flood of squeaks was duly translated, though I had to then put it through a mental adjustment myself, given HK's attitude. I gathered that the Sullustan was in charge of calculating the path between planets for my ship's previous owners. When the first mate of the ship ended up dead in something called a cantina, the Sullustan somehow accessed the cameras around the place, tracking the killer's movements.

That caused my hackles to ripple. And I thought London was bad.

The Captain had felt somewhat belligerent over his employee's untimely death, and so assembled the rest of the crew to hunt the murderer down. They departed quite some time ago, leaving their navigator alone on the ship. Communication with the crew ceased abruptly soon afterwards. The Sullustan had spent the subsequent time fretting. He made sweeping, obsequious and constant apologies for any inconvenience caused and wanted nothing more than to disembark, leave me to my spoils of war, and take up nerf herding, though that may have been HK taking liberties with the narrative.

HK interrupted my musing. "Conjecture: The Sullustan's story does not sound unlikely, though it is impossible to corroborate. It has offered to facilitate the transfer of ownership of this vessel to you."

I rubbed my chin in thought. "Does it- does he want payment for that?" I asked with a sigh. HK's attitude was starting to rub off on me.

"Calculation: Offering him continuing possession of his limbs would probably suffice as remuneration, Master." After a slight pause, he finished with, "Some of them at least."

I rolled my eyes. "No doubt. All right then, tell him to go ahead."

HK paused before responding. "Caution: I am currently unable to ensure good faith on the Sullustan meatbag's behalf, Master. It may try to double-cross us."

I grinned nastily. "Let him try it," I hissed.

After HK made some presumably grisly threats, the Sullustan got to work, whimpering only slightly.

I kept my eyes firmly on my toy. It spun slowly, and stayed dark. The Sullustan worked quickly, and chattered happily after only a few minutes.

"Statement: It is done, Master. Though without your official identity, ownership of this spaceship is now transferred to the bearer of the token you relieved from the Trandoshan's corpse."

"I'll take steps to make it safe," I replied, mentally running through the various anti-theft charms I knew. "Tell him he can go."

From the speed at which the Sullustan bolted, HK was clearly enjoying himself. Once we were alone, I spent some time setting up wards that would prevent the detection of magic cast within a bubble centred on my ship.

"Query: Master, how can you be so sure that the Sullustan meatbag did not betray your mercy? In my current state I am unfit to perform all my duties regarding the protection of your… ugh… person."

I picked up the magical object. "This is a sneak-o-scope. It spins and flashes the more someone nearby is doing something untrustworthy. I've got another one, but that's a professional grade model – and a bit more conspicuous."

"Statement: Intriguing. Reliance on mechanical contrivances is a weakness you should not indulge, Master. Present company excluded, naturally."

I chuckled. "Naturally. Has the broker for that cargo responded yet?"

"Affirmative: Yes, Master. I am uploading the coordinates for the depot into this vessel's navicomputer. It would be in your best interests to acquire a meatbag skilled in operating this vessel, lest you condemn yourself to a fiery and amusing death."

I laced my fingers and extended them palm-outwards. My knuckled cracked. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. If there's one talent I have, it's the ability to fly just about anything," I replied, unlacing my hands and wiggling my fingers. "Exactly what is this cargo? Are we going to have to avoid people to deliver it?"

"Amused answer: Oh no, Master. Quite the opposite in fact."

I frowned. "We won't have to avoid people?"

"Negative: People will avoid us, Master. This world only produces one commodity of any real value to an agricultural world like Telos. I have noticed in the past that meatbags go to all sorts of lengths to avoid coming in contact with their biological waste."

I thought about that for a second before I made the connection. "Oh. Shit."

* * *

Telos was a beautiful glittering ball that looked so much like pictures of Earth that I felt a pang of homesickness that was almost painful. Not that the continents looked anything like Earth; it was the azure oceans and verdant landmasses that struck the chord in my heart.

There was an almost eerie feeling, flying a spaceship through the deep, interstellar gulf between the stars. But feeling the ship shudder under my guidance as we entered the atmosphere was almost poetic. I could feel the bulky vessel writhe through the control stick.

Unloading the cargo was simple enough, given that the station accepting the vast quantities of crap was more or less automated. There wasn't someone on duty who would possibly wonder why, or more to the point – how, a small freighter like mine could disgorge many dozens of times its entire volume of processed human and alien waste. Like a petrol station in reverse, the pumps vacuumed up the shit and duly dispensed the corresponding credits. Once enriched, HK bluffed our way past the automated traffic control, and we were off. Off in search of a new body for him.

Flying a spaceship through atmosphere was a lot different from the smooth, frictionless environment of outer space. Especially since the ship was about as aerodynamic as the Hogwarts Express. When travelling sideways.

The runestones I'd placed on the bulkheads to lighten the ship were invaluable for fuel efficiency, but that lack of weight made flying through crosswinds rather exciting. I held tight to the controls, guiding the ship along the flight-path HK had mapped. Below, rolling fields and farmlands continued uninterrupted for thousands of miles.

"Bloody hell, how much food does this planet produce?" I asked softly.

"Answer: From the publicly available data, the last three growing seasons have produced a mean average export of eighty-four point seven four million, million tonnes of various grains and a further nine point eight two million tonnes of livestock."

I grunted. "Huh, that's a lot of food. I suppose that's why they need so much shit. I've scourgified the hold three times and it still stinks back there."

"Commentary: Forgive me if the intricacies of agriculture, fertilizer and animal husbandry do not figure prominently in my databanks." It only took a day and a half for HK-47 to learn to speak English fluently, and yet he somehow managed to put incredible inflections into innocuous words. Either sarcasm was truly universal or my droid was a masterful orator.

The vast, fertile plain beneath the ship drifted past, the height of the ship disguising its speed. "The landscape ahead is changing. The plains are giving way to hills and mountains." I gave a soft snort at the familiarity. "It looks a little bit like the Scottish Highlands."

"Worthless commentary: If you say so, Master."

I started to respond when a powerful cross-wind gust changed my quip to a curse. I glanced at the _navicomputer_ on the control panel. The crash course I'd been given in Galactic Basic had covered enough numbers for me to read the information. "There's only four minutes to go until we're over our target. I can't see anything down there that looks like a droid manufacturing facility."

HK gave an indelicate burst of static. "Observation: I suspect I know more about agriculture than you know about Droid Manufacturing Facility recognition, Master."

I smirked at HK's response. "No doubt. Here," I said, lifting the heavy metal head up onto the console so it could look out the window. "Can you see anything familiar?"

"Affirmative: Yes, Master. There has been limited erosion and the terraforming that has been undertaken has clearly been focused on terrain suitable for high-density farming. The coordinates supplied are correct."

I nodded, not having anything better to offer. "Okay then, let me land this thing." I put HK back on the co-pilot's chair and began mentally running through the checklist for landing. Fortunately for a luddite like me, most of the steps were adequately performed by the ship's computer.

I picked a likely spot close to the coordinates. It looked relatively flat and clear, but turned out to be a little less than level once I put the ship down. The rear struts sank deeply into the soft earth, leaving the ship listing a couple of degrees to the rear.

Meh, close enough.

I grabbed HK from the seat and tucked him under my arm. "Are you sure you don't want me to levitate you?" I asked.

"Objection: Damn it Master, I'm an assassination droid, not a balloon."

"Fine, let's go and find you a body and you can start carrying yourself around."

"Statement: Gladly."

I moved through the narrow walkways of my spaceship, marvelling at the fact that I had somehow managed to add to my collection of tools one that allowed me more freedom of movement than any Earth-bound human of my time had ever had. I pressed the necessary control and the main access hatch slid open with a hiss of compressed air.

Immediately, the cooler, fresher air of Telos washed over me. I inhaled deeply, noting a definite similarity with the uninhabited areas of Scotland. It was delicious.

"Query: Do you intend to remain immobile for an extended length of time, Master? If so, I shall shut myself down for a while."

I sighed. "No, HK. Just remembering something. Let's go."

The ground was mostly rock covered with a thick layer of springy moss, not that my feet touched the ground; Sirius' old bike easily fit through the door. Hundreds of tiny insects buzzed around me, frustrated from landing by a repellent charm. One of the things about flying on a high-performance bike or a broom like a Firebolt without protection charms is that running into a fly can seriously damage an eye. And no one likes picking bugs out of your teeth after a quick flight.

I'd landed my ship less than half a kilometre from the coordinates supplied by HK, so it took barely revving the engine once and letting out the clutch before I hovered in front of a rust-splotched, moss-covered metal doorframe set in the side of a rocky cliff face. Whatever door existed all those years ago was gone; it was now open to the elements. So the elements had moved right on in and made themselves at home.

I drifted forward into the doorway. I flicked a switch on the bike, igniting the headlights. Light filled a narrow, descending corridor. It was only the relatively clean metal ceiling that indicated a manufactured history. The walls were covered with moss and vines while the floor was a damp marsh. I idled down the short corridor to another metal door, this one also wide open.

"Looks like someone else was here a long time ago," I said, feeling a bit glum. "They didn't bother closing the door on the way out." I adjusted my grip on the handlebars and continued on.

"Observation: Or leave anything not easily removed. The remains of the security droids and weapon mountings have been scavenged."

Now that the floor was level, shallow pools of stagnant, stinking water filled room after room. Swarms of insects so dense that they cast shadows on the wall dully buzzed around in my wake. HK identified several areas of the facility as originally having some function – control room, storage, etc., but there was nothing left at all. The building was a hollow shell.

"Statement: The cavern beyond this door was the manufacturing centre. Completed droids were marched into transport containers at the far wall."

I looked around the gloomy, metal-lined cavern. At one point the wall had given way, allowing rocky rubble from the ceiling to pour through. "So that's it? There's nothing here?" I asked.

"Answer: Apparently not, Master."

I sighed. "Well, let's see if there's anything we missed." I drew the Elder Wand and waved it, shouting, "Accio droid parts!"

As the echoes of my voice died away, I could hear muffled, metallic noises off to one side of the cavern. It seemed to come from under the rubble.

"Um, HK? Before that wall collapsed, was there anything behind it?"

HK-47 paused briefly. "Answer: No. There was a guarded storage room at that point, however."

I pointed the bike towards the rubble and flew forward. "So, if you were a scavenger, how would you try to get past a locked door? Explosives?"

"Contemplative: Possibly. A certain sub-section of meatbags have a habit of using explosives whenever possible, rather than whenever necessary. An inelegant trait common in less perfect beings. It is conceivable that ill-placed explosives could have caused the cave in. Especially if they were placed by an incompetent meatbag. Apologies for the tautology, Master."

I laughed out loud, wondering just how well George would get on with my droid. "I've been close friends with people who enjoy a good bang, and I've known far too many incompetents for my liking. Let's see what our scavengers found eh?"

I raised my wand and began vanishing the loose stones and earth. Some neat transfiguration built stone buttresses and braces to keep the rest of the stone ceiling where it belonged.

The door HK referred to was indeed discoloured from insufficient explosives. What remained of the contents before the over-zealous powder-monkey turned up had been crushed by the resultant ceiling collapse. However, I did uncover the crushed remains of a vaguely humanoid droid. At least, it formed a flat shape that was vaguely humanoid.

"Statement: Ugh. How galling that something based on my design was so easily terminated."

I transfigured a stable, flat platform out of rubble and parked the bike on it, above the stagnant waterline. "I take it that this is a compatible droid body?"

"Objection: It is unusable, Master. Fit only for scrap." HK paused. "Still," he added, ensuring that I understood his level of contempt.

I carefully levitated the remains. Bits broke off from even that little handling. "Let's see, shall we?"

I cast the same repairing charm on the torso section. It puffed up and out with a scream of tortured metal. As the spell ran its course, what had been a sheet of contorted metal a couple of inches thick now resembled a thick shape attached to a narrow waist.

"Exclamation: Master! I… I don't believe it."

"What, you think I found you in some pristine condition and just needed to turn you on?"

"Tentative query: You performed magic on me?"

I chuckled at the horrified tone. "Yup. This exact spell, as a matter of fact." I cast it again, and this time the sounds of squealing electronics emanated from within.

I got the impression that HK found the noises distinctly uncomfortable. I'd have to keep that in mind.

* * *

We recovered an entire body, though the limbs had been forcibly separated from the torso. We left the remains of the head behind. I probably would have taken it just in case, but HK's bitching would have been hard to put up with. Still, I took my time repairing each part, enjoying the flickering in HK's eyes at the noise.

Once back on board, I dumped the bits in the maintenance workshop on the port side of the ship. HK objected, but a cargo ship going off radar and then reappearing was suspicious enough to the sort of people who object to the existence of smugglers. Having scavenged droid parts was a reasonable explanation for the side trip, if any over-zealous bureaucrat decided to try and make my life hell.

We flew back to the spaceport. Locating another cargo wouldn't be difficult, given the mind-bogglingly fertile pastures. The trick would be to pick a planet we could unload it all on with no questions.

HK and I spent several hours buying an entire ships' worth of cargo from numerous dealers to avoid inconvenient questions. I placed light compulsion charms on each to encourage them to remember very little about our transactions after the cargo was loaded.

I took HK to a cantina in the spaceport for a meal. It was heavy on the vegetables and bread, but palatable. Apparently a lot of the people who worked for the corporation that farmed the planet were vegetarians.

The local star had set hours before I got back to my ship.

Where I noticed that the ramp was down. My wand was already out before HK spoke.

"Statement: Master, my sensors detect a single meatbag on board your ship."

I readied my wand and moved forward. The ward schema I placed on the ramp should have prevented anyone with ill intent towards me from entering, but caution was so much a part of my life that it was second nature.

We found the intruder in the maintenance bay.

I looked down at the short, stocky boy, no more than nine or ten years old. He simply sat with his back to the bulkhead, an esoteric tool in hand and working on one of HK-47's new limbs. A picture of studious productivity. Laid out on the worktable was the rest of HK-47's new body; almost completely assembled. Suddenly, he raised his head and gazed at me, no surprise in his eyes. Nor any fear, oddly enough.

"_Is_ _this your ship_?" he said in Basic.

"Translation: The little meatbag wants to know if this ship belongs to you, Master."

I nodded at the boy, having learned from HK that it was a universal sign of acceptance. He looked from me to HK and back to me with a frown. "_Can I come with you? I don't want to stay here_."

"Translation: The little meatbag wants to run away with us. Observation: It is another aggravating constant of my existence is that my Master always manages to attract worthless charity cases who do little more than consume resources better spent elsewhere."

"Ask him his name."

"_Translation: What are you called, meatbag_?"

The boy narrowed his eyes at my droid, not the least bit intimidated by his manner. "Anakin."

I didn't bother waiting for HK to translate his name. "Ask Anakin why we would want to take him with us," I said with a small smile.

"_Translation: What possible worth would a pathetic creature like you be_?"

The boy called Anakin bobbed his head towards HK-47's body. "_I fixed and assembled your droid's body for you, but it needs new power cells installed before you can activate it. I'm really good at fixing things. And I can fly well too. I could even fly this ship if you want._"

I looked down at HK after a second or so of silence. He seemed to hesitate before translating the boy's reply; his voice slow and steady. "Translation: The little meatbag claims to have repaired my body, unlikely as it sounds. On the vanishingly small chance it is true, we should consider kidnapping him. A skilled mechanic is worth a great deal. He also claims to be a pilot, though reaching the controls might present him with some issues."

"I'm not kidnapping a child just because he claims that he's a good mechanic!" I spat. "And before you get all gushy on him, for all you know he's taken your legs apart and welded them back together without joints."

"Request: If he has, can you reciprocate?"

I shook my head and sighed, looking closely at the workbench. Instead of the mess of disparate parts I'd left, the metallic body lying on the bench was whole, except for the arm in the boy Anakin's hands. It was tall, closer to seven feet than six in height. Even lying still it looked quite menacing.

I turned to see that Anakin had risen to his feet and was looking at me with serious eyes.

"Contemplative: I wonder if the boy could attach me to the body?"

I pursed my lips, not entirely sure. "Ask him. Politely. But if this goes wrong, I'm ripping you off and waiting until we can find someone a bit more professional." I glanced at the boy again. "And preferably old enough to shave," I mumbled.

Anakin spoke, his voice inflection indicating he was asking a question. "_What language is that_?"

"_Answer: The antiquated vocalizations are of my Master's home world; a primitive backwater where the natives have barely managed to escape their own gravity well, let alone master hyperspace. The planet's native name is a synonym for dirt, which divulges all you need to know about their technological capabilities. Demand: Now, attach me to my new body._"

After HK-47's lengthy speech, Anakin frowned and looked up at me. He opened his mouth, but thought better of whatever he was going to say. He simply placed the arm back on the workbench and reached out for HK-47's head. "_You're going to need to install some protocols before your droid can operate properly_," he said. "_The torso's memory circuits are so old that they're probably corrupt_."

I sighed and said, "HK?"

"Translation: The little meatbag is merely stating the obvious, Master, that I need to locate and install certain protocols before I will be operating at peak efficiency. Demand: Hand me over."

I shrugged and passed the heavy head to my new mechanic. "Your funeral. So to speak," I said.

_Chapter 9_

_It was an experience watching Anakin work. The lad had a studious intensity that rivalled Hermione's own. He focused completely on the task at hand, without hesitation, seeming to know exactly what needed doing. He didn't stick his tongue out though, or twist a strand of bushy hair between his fingers._

_My anxiety faded as HK's new body was fully assembled. There was no hesitancy or indecision as he reached for various tools or lined up different components. Robotic limbs linked seamlessly with the torso in minutes. Attaching the head took some more time._

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: A big thanks to all my reviewers, and a big apology too. Not long after I posted the last chapter of this fic, my daughter tripped over the power cable to my laptop and sent it flying off the table. The thumb drive I keep all my work on was cracked, and the hard drive of the laptop ruined. Not even a data recovery company could get anything off them.

Drafts for the next six chapters of this fic lost. And about 30 thousand words of a new fic. Losing about sixty thousand words all up killed all desire to write when I had to rewrite everything I'd already done. Oh, and I lost all my job work too, but at least I got paid to recreate that…

I did take the opportunity to evaluate my writing style for this fic. I'm going to lengthen the chapters and decrease the detail – quite a few reviews found it odd that only a day had passed in 7 chapters. Hopefully the balance is better. Thanks for not giving up on me!


	9. Chapter 9

disclaimer=standard

Anything you recognise belongs to JK or George Disney. Anything else probably belongs to them too.

/disclaimer

o_ooo000ooo_o

Previously:

"_Translation: The little meatbag is merely stating the obvious, Master, that I need to locate and install certain protocols before I will be operating at peak efficiency. Demand: Hand me over."_

_I shrugged and passed the heavy head to my new mechanic. "Your funeral. So to speak," I said._

**Chapter 9**

It was an experience watching Anakin work. The lad had a studious intensity that rivalled Hermione's own. He focused completely on the task at hand, without hesitation, seeming to know exactly what needed doing. He didn't stick his tongue out though, or twist a strand of bushy hair between his fingers.

My anxiety faded as HK's new body was fully assembled. There was no hesitancy or indecision as he reached for various tools or lined up different components. Robotic limbs linked seamlessly with the torso in minutes. Attaching the head took some more time.

The first delivery of cargo arrived during the assembly, but having watched for a while I was comfortable to leave HK's side to stow the pallets. HK had organised a delivery schedule with the dealers that would hopefully prevent any single delivery-being from seeing more than one other delivery. Still, I was prepared to place a few muggle-confounding charms, as needed. It turned out to be unneeded, as without exception, a simple droid made each delivery.

The expanded hold happily accommodated the massive volume of food. It wasn't anywhere near the limits of my magic; I didn't have enough funds to purchase enough cargo to fill that. But it did mean that I got the most out of my current supply of credits.

As I secured a load, a rhythmic clanking and soft, hydraulic hisses drew my attention. HK strode into the hold, his silver body looking quite spiffy. The rusty head took away some of the effect.

"Statement: The little meatbag has completed his task, Master."

"Obviously. That body is quite imposing," I said. It was true. At seven feet tall, the mostly silver droid exuded menace.

"Declaration: It is woeful, Master. An initial audit of this body's mêlée protocols indicates a thirty-eight point three four percent combat efficiency rating."

I rubbed my chin, wondering how in Merlin's name he managed to encapsulate a chaotic system such as combat efficiency down to a single value. "How do we go about getting you better, then? Given how rare the parts are, I don't imagine there's a local software shop we can buy combat - what did you call them, protocols?"

"Statement: I am programmed to improve my skills with use. Post-combat evaluations enable me to prune redundant code segments. Observing and rating innovative techniques expands my repertoire."

"The more you fight, the better you get?"

"Affirmative: Succinctly put, Master."

I considered that. "Well, stick with me and you'll get all the combat you could want."

"Confirmatory: I agree."

"You do?"

"Answer: Oh yes, Master. Your ability to manipulate spatial dimensions and mass – even on a relatively small scale – is one the entire galaxy would cheerfully go to war to control. You could purchase entire planetary systems with the sums that would be offered."

I swallowed as my mercenary instincts waged a sudden and intense assault on my homesickness. "Really?" I said in an involuntarily high pitch. I cleared my throat and repeated in my usual baritone, "Really?"

"Confirmation: Oh yes, Master. Any new technology that extends currently understood scientific limits is valuable. Manipulating spatial dimensions is so fundamentally revolutionary that should your ability become known, I calculate a high probability of actual planetary revolutions. The chance to take part in such broadly distributed violence is one I do not intend to miss."

I cleared my throat again. "I see. Well, if I were planning on staying here in this time, I might well consider that. But I'm going to do everything I can to find a way to travel back however far I've been flung into the future."

"Observation: Time travel, excluding understood relativistic effects, is considered impossible, Master. Traveling backwards in time violates currently understood physical laws."

I snorted. "One of my best friends wanted to take more classes at school when she was thirteen. The headmaster gave her an object that enabled her to travel back in time over and over again, a couple of hours at a time, just so she could take the extra classes without him having to stump up further cash for more teachers."

What do you know; it is possible to render a droid speechless...

* * *

HK had numerous, entertaining and immoral suggestions for using a timeturner. He was almost crushed when I pointed out that I did not possess one in this time. I left him to his own devices, which would probably result in him coming up with a way to turn a tickling charm into a weapon of mass destruction.

Once I finished securing the last delivery, HK presented me with something he called a datapad. Rather than suggestions for various methods of killing, he had entered a list of possible planetary systems where we could sell the cargo; broken down by distance, expected price ranges, likelihood of discovery, levels of governmental corruption, organised crime, security and the like.

I sat down in the pilot's seat and began examining the data. After a while, Anakin entered the cockpit of the ship, HK on his heels. The boy spoke to me, his tone obvious that he'd just asked a question. I looked over to my droid with an eyebrow raised.

"Translation: The little meatbag wants to know if you have decided where to sell your cargo. Query: Shall I convince him that curiosity is a trait that is likely to result is loss of his respiration privileges?"

I shook my head. "No. Tell him I haven't decided yet."

The pair had a short exchange. Despite the fact that HK had equipped himself with a weapon that would not look too out of place on the top of a small tank, the boy exhibited no fear. Indeed, he stared up at the tall droid with an expression bordering on insolence.

Prime Gryffindor material, that one.

"Translation: The little meatbag suggests that we sell our cargo on Naboo, Master."

I frowned. That name was familiar; it was on HK's list. I swiped the screen of the datapad, locating and selecting Naboo. It had ranked well on some of HK's criteria, but poorly overall; demand was high for food and medical supplies, due to a recent occupation by a hostile force. But that force had likely taken everything of value that could be feasibly moved, leaving their ability to pay in doubt.

Still, beyond that (admittedly rather important) fact, it fit my personal criteria quite well. It was inhabited by humans, making it easier for me to blend in. It was considered a very free society, with low levels of corruption; meaning it was unlikely I'd be obliged to vanish from the local law enforcement's clutches or violently convince crime bosses that it was in their interest to leave me alone. "Why Naboo?"

HK didn't bother to translate. Anakin babbled away at my droid for some time.

"Observation: It appears that the data I supplied is obsolete. The post of Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate was recently vacated in exceptional circumstances. The new incumbent previously held the post of Senator of Naboo. Political analysts posit that it was the invasion of his homeworld that gave him the required boost in support to gain the position." At my blank expression, he continued, "Clarification: The Supreme Chancellor is the nominal head of the Galactic Government, the most powerful elected political position in the galaxy."

A smile grew on my face. "Really? So the guy in charge of the government across the galaxy comes from Naboo? I'd say that they're likely to get all the credits they need to rebuild."

"Agreement: Indeed, Master. Such a situation is a veritable breeding ground for corruption, graft, profit and violence. Especially violence."

I nodded. "Naboo it is then," I said.

Anakin didn't need a translation. He gave a whoop of joy.

"But!" I snapped, holding up a hand and instantly damping his enthusiasm. "You are not coming. HK, tell him that I'll pay him well for his work putting you together, but he's going back to his family. I'm not kidnapping him."

Anakin flushed red as HK translated, though the tone my droid used was unnecessarily spiteful. The boy spat back a quick response.

"Translation: The little meatbag claims his only family is his mother. Further, he claims she is still a slave on Tatooine."

I regarded him for a long moment. "So why is he so insistent on going to Naboo then? Wouldn't he want to go to Tatooine? Or did he run away?"

Anakin answered HK's translation quickly.

"Translation: The little meatbag claims to be friends with the Queen of Naboo, Master."

I gave his homespun clothes a doubtful look. "Really?"

"Calculation: Vocal analysis suggests a ninety-eight point seven two percent chance of veracity, Master. Establishing contact with the local information service now. Confirmation: It is true, Master. As unlikely as it sounds, this boy was reportedly instrumental in defeating the occupying forces."

I stared at Anakin for a long while, causing him to blush slightly. "Instrumental?"

"Clarification: According to the official reports, it was his singular actions that destroyed the command ship of the invading army."

I continued to look at the lad. "Could someone have edited those reports?" I asked dubiously. "I mean, if they were true it begs the question – what's a planetary hero doing here in rags? Anyone, especially a kid, who saved a whole world would be inundated with offers of a home by the wealthy and powerful, just for the status!"

HK dutifully translated and listened to Anakin's response. "Translation: Until recently, the boy claims to have been a slave on Tatooine along with his mother, only winning his freedom just before the election of the new Chancellor. The Nabooan Queen was a member of the party who freed him. After returning to Naboo and helping to liberate the planet, the individual directly responsible for freeing him deposited him here on Telos to work on the farms."

I frowned. It sounded fantastical. "Colour me suspicious."

"Confirmation: I have substantiated the events from local news and galactic news sources. The little meatbag did leave certain facts out of his narration, however."

"Oh?"

"Recitation: A single Corporation runs the vast majority of the farms on this planet. It is owned and run by... the group of individuals who attempted to arrest us. A prominent member of that group freed the boy and deposited him here to work."

I knew about operational security. "I see. Any reason you aren't naming them?"

"Answer: The little meatbag would no doubt recognise the word, Master, thus alerting him to the fact that we are aware of his duplicity."

I rubbed my chin. "That doesn't answer why they just dumped him here though."

"Deduction: The boy must be Force sensitive."

I immediately snapped my attention to HK. "What makes you say that?"

"Summarisation: Were he not, he would no doubt have been fostered somewhere on a civilized planet, as you posited. Even when I was last active, the Order in question laid a claim of jurisdiction over all Force sensitive meatbags. That aside, his recorded accomplishments both during the recent upheaval on Naboo and on Tatooine would be impossible for all but the most skilled or highly trained organic. Meatbags with Force sensitivity are capable of incredible feats by instinct. Finally, it is an open secret that failed students, and those yet to be selected for further training by a Master, are sent to these farms to..." HK paused and actually shuddered, "...ugh, work productively."

I covered my eyes with a hand. "Bugger," I said.

"Query: Master, is there a problem?"

I sighed deeply. A slave was rescued by magical beings. Told he was one of them. Saved the day and regarded a hero. Then abandoned in a place he hated to work with no friends while the magical beings got to live their lives as they saw fit.

If Anakin wanted to leave, I wasn't going to him deny that.

He'd proven his value already. And it sounded like he'd been exposed to the sort of violent excitement that filled my world. Of course, the Jedi would be pissed at me.

That thought brightened my mood. "Fine. Tell him to go and pick out a bunk. We're heading to Naboo."

* * *

Anakin turned out to be a genius in every sense of the word. He was a polyglot, able to communicate effectively in quite a few languages, though in a lot of them he was better with curses and threats than anything else. One he was fluent in was called Huttese, which HK assured me was very useful in underworld dealings.

He was also a mechanical prodigy; HK wasn't the first droid he had reassembled. Apparently Anakin had assembled and programmed a droid entirely from scraps before the Jedi found him.

I shook my head at that. When I was nine there was a kid at school who made his own crystal radio set following instructions he found in his grandfather's attic. He was considered a genius; so much so that he was picked on almost as much as me. At that age I was pleased enough to hide from Dudley in the school library, reading Biggles.

But that wasn't the end of Anakin's skills. After examining the navcomputer for an hour or so, he was confident that he could make the complex mathematical calculations necessary to plot out a course in hyperspace.

Hermione would have been insanely jealous. Mind you, she'd probably have been smugly satisfied that his hair was almost as bad as hers.

Personally, I was conflicted. I knew I wasn't the brightest wizard around, but Anakin's accomplishments under his circumstances would have given Leonardo da Vinci self-esteem issues. But I couldn't find it in my heart to be envious of him, he was just too likeable. Everything he did was to try and please me.

I found that uncomfortable. I remembered being like that. Before the world's attitude burned it out of me. I tried hard to ignore the sensation; the memory of what I'd deliberately discarded.

But still, despite the freedom that came from the apathy of not giving a hoot for the rest of the world, I found myself feeling protective of the lad. Something I'd not been in years.

I continued my lessons in Basic as we traveled through hyperspace, and Anakin insisted on learning English in the meantime. The swirling azure vortex had been glorious to observe from the cockpit for maybe half an hour, before it started giving me a headache. I took to taking my lessons in the small recreation area rather than in the cockpit, where the flickering blue lights grew annoying on a datapad screen.

I did have to take control of the ship as we exited hyperspace at a navigation point in space. Telos and Naboo were both on a trade corridor that stretched from one arm of the galaxy to the opposite arm. The pre-calculated route from Telos to Naboo had a few waypoints. At the predetermined time, the ship dropped into space and the sudden darkness left afterimages dancing on my retinas.

For about five seconds.

A flash of blinding light arced across the inky backdrop and impacted high on the ship. It shuddered and lurched, and my ears popped at a sudden drop in air pressure. Something slammed shut back in the ship, and the pressure stabilized.

I swore, lunged forward and grabbed the controls. I jerked and twisted the control stick, hauling the ship around. "What the hell was that?" I demanded.

HK stood as still as a statue at the back of the cockpit. "Answer: We are under attack, Master," he said in a calm monotone. He turned his head to face one of the flashing warning lights. "Observation: That shot disabled our forward turrets."

I blinked. "Turrets? There are guns on this heap of shit?"

"Negative: Not any more, Master."

"Sodding wonderful," I grumbled, swinging the ship around so I could see the ship firing on us.

It was beautiful. Maybe five or six times the size of my ship, it oozed menace. It looked like a metallic raptor mid-swoop. A sleek, silver body framed by two 'wings' bristling with powerful looking guns.

I loved it.

It fired again at us. But unlike my non-technical expectations for laser weapons, the bright energy pulses shot out at a speed slow enough that I could react. My significantly lightened ship nimbly dodged the blasts.

Anakin ran into the cockpit in a low, crouching gait. He dove for the co-pilot's seat and started slapping various parts of the console. He called out a couple of words in his piping voice, which I was too busy to try and translate.

"Translation: Shields up," HK helpfully supplied.

"This thing has shields too? Huh," I said, weaving through another salvo.

Anakin cheered. I grinned at him. He gave me the local equivalent of a 'thumbs up'. At least, that's how I translated it.

I grew more comfortable with my ability to weave my ship around the deadly flashes of light. Anakin's delight grew with each passing moment; he was definitely an adrenaline junkie. Even HK offered a typically underhanded compliment.

"HK, got any idea why they're attacking us?" I asked, almost lazily barrel-rolling over the next shot. It was all rather fun, though I'd need to come up with a long-term solution. Currently, the situation was a stalemate.

"Answer: That is almost certainly a pirate vessel, Master."

"You have pirates in space?" I blurted, giving that revelation all due consideration. "Cool."

"Recitation: Indeed, Master. Pirates will usually attempt to disable their victim's ship and negotiate safe passage in return for cargo. The probability of them adhering to any agreement once surrender is secured is low."

"They haven't demanded our surrender yet," I pointed out.

"Observation: We are clearly not disabled yet," he retorted testily.

A plan formed. I grinned; a wide and evil smile. "Perhaps we should surrender."

"Objection: Master! I protest!"

"I'm not _actually_ going to surrender, HK," I spat, smoothly dodging around yet another blast. "I just want them to take us aboard that ship. It would be much simpler to hijack it from the inside, don't you think?"

"Mollified Answer: It would be more convenient, certainly."

A pinging sound rang, and Anakin pressed a button on another console. A glowing blue figure with both long head tentacles and what looked like horns flickered into life above a lens. It gave a short speech.

"Translation: The Togruta demands our surrender."

I nodded. "Would he try to destroy the ship if we stopped moving and surrendered? He'd lose the cargo that way."

"Observation: Successful pirates do not needlessly waste valuable ships or destroy cargo, Master. The same could not be said for prisoners."

"Good. Can you tell where the bridge of that ship is?"

HK silently observed the distant ship for a few seconds. "Affirmative: Yes Master."

"Excellent. Tell him we'll stop and prepare to be boarded. When the two ships are attached and steady relative to each other, calculate and give me the distance and vector from our cockpit to their bridge. I'll apparate over to their ship while you meet the boarding party. Feel free to be as destructive as you like as you try out your combat programming. In fact, I insist upon it. I don't like pirates."

"Satisfaction: Oh Master, this is going to be fun."

* * *

An unexpected problem occurred half a second after I apparated onto the pirate ship. HK's directions were impeccable, and I appeared in an unoccupied spot barely a centimeter above the floor of the bridge.

I had side-along apparated Anakin with me. I wasn't about to leave him behind where one shot could open a hole that would vent the entire ship's atmosphere into space. The lad had been in combat before; indeed, by all reports had conducted himself superbly. I was confident that I could keep him shielded and safe.

But he was Force sensitive. And apparition did not agree with Jedi or Sith at all. He vomited down the front of my clothes.

The sudden, unexplained and inexplicable sound of a retching human proved cause for stunned surprise. That a glob of partially digested breakfast hung in the air on a partially invisible intruder no doubt added to the shock.

I spotted the being that contacted us and dropped him with a stunner. The vomit on my chest proved an enticing target, and the rest of the bridge crew drew weapons and aimed them at me.

But I'd faced men with guns before; often enough that I could react by reflex rather than conscious thought. A wide-angled, weapon-summoning charm wrenched the drawn guns from their hands and the undrawn weapons from their holsters. I was mildly surprised at the sheer number that flew towards me.

I halted their progress and let them fall to the ground. Angered at being so simply disarmed, a Trandoshan roared and charged at me, arms wide and ready to tackle. I put a bludgeoning charm between his eyes. It snapped his head back and dropped him skidding on the floor, unconscious.

The other three beings on the bridge started screaming. One shouted, "Jedi!" and fell to his knees, arms aloft. Another jabbed a button and yelled a warning into a console. I could hear his voice echo throughout the rest of the ship. The last stood still, his attention wavering between the stunned captain, the unconscious lizardman, the pile of weapons, and the vomit on my chest; it being the only solidly visible part of me.

I gave my wand a flick and sent the one warning the rest of the ship flying into the immobile one. A distant explosion and faint echoes of weapon fire echoed up the corridor leading to the bridge.

It only took a couple more spells to completely neutralise the bridge crew. I vanished the vomit, dispelled the disillusionment and helped Anakin to his feet. "Are you all right?"

We'd covered that generic query in our language lessons. He nodded and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He swallowed as he looked around at the unconscious beings before looking up at me with awe.

I gestured towards the pilot's seat. "Can you get control?" I asked.

He seemed to understand. He jumped into the seat and started fiddling with the control panel. My hesitancy faded. The lad looked like he knew exactly what he was doing.

I turned my attention to the entrance to the bridge. The corridor connecting it to the rest of the ship sloped up sharply, meaning that anyone coming to the bridge would have to walk down an incline. From my position, I could see people coming before they could see me.

Assuming their head was on the top of their body of course. I had to make certain assumptions.

Rapid footsteps turned into two pairs of booted feet running down the slope to the bridge. I tossed a couple of petrification spells at them, which caused both figures to stiffen and collapse forward. Two human males slid into the bridge on their bellies.

Anakin pulled his arms in and arched his back, looking as though he felt a spider crawling between his shoulder blades. He looked at me, almost in disgust. "What that?" he asked in crude English.

I shrugged. "Magic," I replied. Without HK, we couldn't really get into a philosophical and technical discussion around supernatural powers.

He tilted his head to one side. "Why not I feel magic on that?" he asked, pointing out the starboard viewport. I glanced at the indicated direction to see the front of my ugly ship. There was a gaping hole in the top of it, exposing the inner workings. I felt my hairs on my neck rise at the thought of how close we'd come to death by depressurization.

I grimaced as I considered Anakin's question. It was probably the magical-detection warding runes I'd placed on the ship probably kept him from feeling the discomfort of my magic while aboard. "Wait until HK gets here," I replied. The weapon discharges were getting louder but less regular. So were the screams of terror.

Anakin nodded and turned back to his task. I looked around at the bodies and decided to restrain them using muggle methods rather than magic. Hopefully, enchanted handcuffs wouldn't offend Anakin's delicate disposition.

Or allow the aliens to escape. That would be irritating to have to subdue them again.

* * *

HK joined us in a remarkably short time. His silver body was pockmarked with burns and scorch marks, covered in arterial blood splatter (both blue and red) and his left leg was badly damaged, the foot dragging along the floor. But his attitude was positively giddy at his success. He did not express it so, however.

"Observation: That was the single most paradoxical experience of my existence, Master. As enjoyable as it was to finally indulge in some unadulterated violence, my performance was detestable. My shot grouping was so poor I could barely keep from scrapping myself out of despair. Twice I was saved from debilitating damage only due to incompetence on the part of my targets. As pervasive as such ineptitude is, I refuse to allow myself to rely on it."

"You just took on how many?"

"Answer: Twelve, Master."

I nodded. "You took on twelve pirates and walked away. And even if your shot precision was poor, that's still a reasonable kill count."

"Indignation: It is not reasonable, Master! You have no idea how reduced I am! When I served my creator, boarding a vessel such as this would not present me with any difficulty whatsoever. I would certainly not need extensive repairs."

I sighed, but pointed to the stains on his chest. "You've got a big gun, how come you let someone get close enough to get blood on you?"

HK held up his left hand. It had chunks of flesh and gristle stuck between the joints. "Answer: Two meatbags tried ambushing me with some droid retraining technology I am not familiar with. As they were inside the effective range of my weapon, I was obliged to manually extract their tracheas. Request: I require a short bladed vibroknife or similar to increase my efficiency in such situations, Master."

As someone intimately exposed to the seedy underbelly of humanity, I'd seen the inside bits of people before. But there was something deeply disturbing about a robot with the ability to tear someone's throat out and only worry about how inefficient the action was. I began to wonder at the wisdom of letting such a droid loose on the galaxy at large.

"Right, well, come here," I ordered, bringing my wand to bear. I vanished the biological remains from him and then cast a couple of repairing charms. Both Anakin and HK exhibited discomfort at the spells, but my droid was back to his pristine best in seconds.

HK at least was appreciative. "Gratitude: As distasteful as the procedure is, that is without doubt the most efficient method I have ever encountered for restoring mechanical components, Master."

I nodded. "Glad you like it. Can you tell if there are any other pirates alive on the ship?"

HK was silent for a moment. "Analysis: The restrained meatbags in visual range only; my sensors detect no other lifesigns, beyond the expected vermin and non-sentient organisms."

"Excellent. Right, let's work out how to get both my ships to Naboo, shall we? You know, I find myself rather enjoying collecting starships. I wonder if I can get the whole set?"

* * *

It took some work, plus some help from a couple of other droids (astromechs, HK called them) to operate the larger ship. The central computer, which controlled the navcomputer, was voice-locked, but that was easily solved by HK's ability to mimic someone's voice and a brief Legilimency scan on the head honcho to snag the code.

While Anakin familiarised himself with the ship's controls, HK trawled the computer for useful information.

"Discovery: The attempt on our vessel was not a fortunate happenstance, Master. It was a planned ambush."

I looked up from the pilot's console. "Planned? We only decided our destination just before we left. Unless..." I trailed off, consciously refraining from glancing over at Anakin.

"Deduction: The little meatbag's involvement is unlikely. Data sources on numerous planets were regularly accessed and evaluated by slicers aboard this ship. One person purchasing cargo at so many dealers on Telos raised several flags in their target assessment matrix."

I winced. "Well, we had to hide our ability to transport disproportionate volume somehow."

"Conjecture: I postulate that it was that very inexplicable behaviour that raised suspicions. Given the limited size of our vessel, it is highly likely that the crew inferred that we were hauling contraband, and that our legitimate purchase of bulk cargo was simply a crude cover."

"Ah," I said. "We couldn't carry so much cargo in this small ship; therefore we were obviously transporting something far more compact and valuable. You know, that would make sense. But how did they know where we would be?"

"Recitation: Commercial hyperspace routes are public knowledge. Our departure vector limited the possible pool of planetary destinations. This particular waypoint is used by merchants leaving Telos on our vector traveling to a large majority of those destinations. The algorithms they used calculated that was an eighty-three point seven two percent chance of us exiting hyperspace at this point."

I grimaced. "Well, we'll need to work out a way to hide ourselves a bit better. But that's for later. Did you find any bounties for this crew?"

"Affirmative: Oh yes, Master. The crew were quite proud of the rewards offered for their capture or death. They advertised the posted bounties among themselves. One conveniently collated them all into a single data package. In English, I believe the term translates as 'bragging rights'."

Anakin finished with the console and piped up, a smile on his face. The kid was so guileless that I was going to have to teach him cards or something, just to stop his expression broadcasting his emotions.

"Translation: The new hyperspace route has been calculated and entered. The navcomputer on our other vessel has been slaved to this one. Both ships will follow the same route."

I raised an eyebrow at HK. "That's useful. But what happened to your usual disdain for meatbags?"

"Prevarication: I respect efficiency, Master."

I chuckled, figuring that Anakin had managed to calculate the route faster than HK had expected. "Telling me that you are distorting your response before you answer makes me think you are being less than truthful with me."

"Prevarication: It is your choice to believe so."

I turned to Anakin. "Go for it," I said with a nod, causing his grin to grow even wider. He pressed a couple of buttons, grabbed a lever and shifted it forward in one smooth move. There was the smallest shudder as the inertial compensator strained to cope with our sudden acceleration. I shook my head in wonder; even the most powerful inertia-damping charms couldn't come close to compensating to such abrupt changes in velocity.

"HK, can you see what you can find out about the jurisdiction of these bounties? See if we can unload them at Naboo. Oh, and see what we can do to keep this ship; it's much better than my other one. It doesn't have a faint yet persistent aroma of shit."

* * *

We passed two more waypoints unmolested, though the tension was high each time. Finally, we reached our destination. Naboo was a glittering ball that looked even more like Earth than Telos. Dozens of ships were within visual range, waiting patiently for clearance to land. A few moments after we reverted from hyperspace, our com lit up.

The blue figure who appeared this time wore a severe uniform with a rank insignia. He barked a few threatening words that I didn't catch.

"Translation: The pompous meatbag has identified this vessel as belonging to a known pirate crew, and is demanding that we surrender. Observation: It appears he believes that a successful crew of anti-authoritarian criminals would surrender to him simply because he demands it in an authoritative tone of voice. The cognitive dissonance you organic meatbags display is astounding."

I shrugged, not disagreeing. I'd seen and dealt with puffed-up bullies before. "Tell him that we are simply innocent traders who fell afoul of this dastardly pirate crew," I said theatrically. "Inform him that we were fortunate enough to have with us a combat droid capable of pacifying an entire crew of reprobates. Oh, and tell him that we want the bounties posted on them and claim the ship as rightful booty."

HK appeared to process this. "Query: You intend to claim piratical behaviour to avoid being arrested for piracy?"

"Is that a problem?"

"Negative: Not at all, Master. Calculating possible responses. Charging weapons. This will be fun."

I grinned at him, but before I could suggest he calm down, Anakin spoke up. The hologram blinked at Anakin's name, was visibly startled at recognising him, and became almost subservient in manner.

"Or we could just use our resident celebrity," I said wryly.

* * *

Anakin's presence pushed us to the head of all sorts of queues. About ten minutes after the hologram disappeared, an official looking ship with sweeping, elegant lines pulled up alongside and docked with us. The cheeks on the boarding party ranged from pink with delight at the haul of surviving pirates to green with horror at the brutal vivisection on the deceased – I hadn't bothered cleaning the bits up yet. For a droid that claimed abominable levels of efficiency, he certainly could make up for it in sheer, distributed violence.

There was no condemnation however, which I found pleasantly satisfactory. Quite often over the past few years I'd been obliged to sit through lecture after repetitive lecture from indignant career bureaucrats who felt that my failure to bring in targets alive was simply due to a lack of effort on my part. Many Auror chiefs belonged to that seat-polishing set. Supposedly, it reflected poorly on them when a lone agent could waltz in and neutralise whatever problem they had.

I never could figure that mindset out. I wasn't constrained by the same laws they were, so of course I would be more effective in certain situations. You'd think that law enforcement leadership would be more enthusiastic. But no, the gratitude displayed by politicians who could take credit for ending a threat was always in direct contrast to the barely contained rage on Auror chiefs.

The Paris-based Auror chief in particular really had it in for me. Jean-Louis Devereaux absolutely loathed me; just because I was English. After all, every Englishmen knows that French women have a relaxed attitude towards matrimonial monogamy, right? And for someone pushing fifty, Madame Devereaux was a seriously fit witch who found fame, or at least infamy, intoxicating.

Fortunately, the French Ministry had fewer gripes with me than their Auror chief; especially the Mugwump Delacour. He was always pleased with my work; ever since the first bounty he hired me for resulted in such positive press that he ended up getting appointed to the ICW as France's representative. So long as he could keep Gabrielle on a different continent whenever I was in town, he was happy to pay my exorbitant rates to have problems neutralized.

Anakin's presence certainly solved one problem. Coupled with my high-priority cargo, we were given landing permission for my first ship. The other would need to remain in high orbit to be scanned and made secure by the pseudo-military forces on loan from the Galactic Government.

I was hesitant to leave my new ship in the hands of an armed force; it would make retaking it annoying and dealing with the consequences tedious. But Anakin assured me that the fellow in charge was honourable and would keep his word. Captain Panaka was not exactly Anakin's friend, but he was a well thought of ally.

Anakin was keen to go and see the Queen, while I was just as keen not to. Since his presence was already known however, forbidding him from socializing would no doubt attract even more unwanted attention. It was probable that the Jedi knew he'd disappeared from Telos, and if pirates had found us it wouldn't be difficult for the Jedi to do so.

Given that they'd dumped him on a planet and vanished into the sky, I wasn't sure just how much they valued him. Maybe by taking him I'd done them a favour? In any event, I wanted to sell my cargo and be off.

So HK and I left him in the hands of the security team, took a shuttle over to my first ship, and descended to the planet's surface.

* * *

Even obviously damaged, my ship managed the atmosphere of Naboo with unexpected ease. On landing we got a few questioning looks and a couple of pointed laughs, but I had long ago learned to ignore such things.

There was no formal customs or anything; Naboo's infrastructure and civil service had been thoroughly stripped by the invaders. We had to pay a harried-looking lass (with a familiar crown of short horns – I had to forcibly keep myself from gripping my wand) a landing fee and a couple of other taxes based on the ship's stated hauling capacity for the right to sell items to the populous. I handed over the credits without a hint of the amusement I felt on my face.

We were directed to an open-air, bazaar-type market where dozens of ships were unloading food and medical supplies. These were then sold directly to buyers. There were a handful of uniformed beings keeping things from getting out of control, but for the most part they didn't seem needed. The people of Naboo seemed gentile, polite and peaceful; if rather hungry.

My cargo, coming from Telos, was quite in demand. Telos, or the AgriCorps at least, had a reputation for producing healthy, nutritious and uncontaminated food. The security seals on the pallets raised the value substantially.

HK's mercenary instincts served us well, as did our vast stores. We were able to supply uncountable small and medium buyers, and by keeping a track of what was selling quickly, HK could adjust prices on the fly.

I was kept busy levitating cargo out the doors and dispensing compulsion charms. Even after several hours, we only sold about half of what we had. With night falling and the bazaar winding down, we lifted off and flew across several timezones to another major city, where we did the whole repetitive exercise again. The market was smaller at the second city, with a different population mix. The humans were almost outnumbered by a species with long-ears, long-faces and short eyestalks – Gungans, according to HK. Still, they were hungry too, so we began sating the local appetite. Still encumbered with unsold cargo as that market wound down, we took off once more and picked a third major settlement, where we finally unloaded everything we had.

We hadn't been paid in credits, but in Senate-stamped trade tokens. Apparently there was some political resistance to just handing out hard cash to destitute victims of an invasion. There was some thought that it would just be used for unapproved purposes. It made little difference to us, however. There was a heavily-guarded station at the Theed spaceport staffed by Galactic Senate bureaucrats. They swapped the tokens for credits for offworld merchants who had official approval to trade.

I flew back and refueled the ship at the spaceport, noting that the pile of credits I'd taken from my ship's previous owners, Milanench and the two Jedi had expanded almost a hundredfold in just two journeys. At this rate, I'd be back at my previous level of personal wealth in no time.

* * *

The next morning HK transmitted a request for clearance to travel to the palace hangers to pick Anakin up. I flew the ship over the recovering city and landed in the assigned spot. On powering down the engines however, we were greeted by a group of Nabooan security forces led by Captain Panaka himself.

He made a declaration in Basic. I recognized it even though I could only roughly translate some of the words. I'd heard the same speech from officials often enough that I had long ago come to the conclusion that it was a standard script. "HK, did he just say that we were to go with them? I missed the second bit, but I'm guessing he wants me to disarm."

"Affirmative: A reasonable approximation, Master. It was phrased as a request, but the underlying tone suggests otherwise. The meatbag also demanded that I remain here on the ship. He did not mention anything about your weaponry."

I snorted, crossed my arms and leaned against the bulkhead of the ship, a studied posture meant to convey disrespectful obstinacy. "Tell him we're only going to do one of those things, but it's his choice as to which."

"Observation: Openly defying meatbags charged with quelling resistance tends to escalate the violence level in a most satisfactorily rapid manner, Master. I have no objection whatsoever to laying waste to an entire planetary security force. However, bloodshed on such a scale will hamper future efforts to exploit their need for expensive supplies. This planet would no longer be a viable trading partner."

I kept my eyes directly on Panaka, but answered HK. "Ah, but he's not here to arrest us. He wouldn't be mucking about with requests if that was the case. He wants something. And he wants me at a disadvantage when he tells me what it is. I'm not inclined to play along, so tell him to pick which of his two orders he wants us to follow."

Our conversation in an unknown language caused a few narrowed eyes in the ranks. HK's answer caused Panaka to flush so much that I could see it even on his dusky cheeks. He spat out another demand.

"Translation:" HK began.

"Don't bother," I cut him off. I stared into Panaka's eyes and whispered, "Legilimens," while giving him an insouciant, one-shouldered shrug. "Tell him that he's welcome to either put his offer forward here, or sod off. It's no skin off my nose either way. But if he wants me to come with him, then we're both going. And we're going armed."

Panaka listened to HK, then raised his chin and retorted. Without understanding the words, through my spell I got the sensation of honesty, frustration and a tinge of shame.

"Translation: The meatbag claims that he merely wishes to offer you a commission. It is supposedly a delicate matter, however, and not to be discussed openly."

I nodded. "He's a rules-and-regulations guy, this one. And he wants something done that's borderline illegal, and it's making him frustrated."

"Observation: An astute analysis, Master."

I pushed off the bulkhead and strode down the ramp. "Well then, tell him that I'm always interested in money, so I'll happily hear him out. Come on. No sense in wasting time. We can ignore his demands for you to stay here while we walk."

* * *

Amid a constant stream of objections, we were taken into the palace via a back door and escorted through deserted corridors. Our destination was a secure room that contained a chap in ceremonial robes. Like most Nabooans I'd met, he looked haggard and weary. He spoke briefly with Panaka, who answered with disgust evident in his voice, before speaking to me. Panaka remained while his men filed out and firmly closed the door behind them.

"Translation: A standard, inefficient welcome and insincere inquiry into your physical health and status, Master. The meatbag's name is Sio Bibble."

I nodded, having understood the common phrases from my lessons. I tried replying in the local lingo. "Mr. Bibble, what you want?"

Bibble looked blankly at my question, and I made a mental note to redouble my efforts in learning Basic. Instead of answering, he asked another in return. I recognized it as a simple offer; would I like some food or drink?

I shook my head. "Credits," I said in Basic, holding up a hand and rubbing my fingertips together.

He sighed and shook his head minutely. "Very well," he responded. I was pleased at my ability to follow the simple conversation so far.

He took a deep breath, pulled out a datapad and started it up. He swiped the screen, showing me statues after paintings after books after jewellery. He spoke at length as he flicked past images of really quite impressive artwork.

"Translation: The Trade Federation stripped the planet of everything of value during the occupation and sold it. The Nabooans want it back, but can't afford to buy it."

"I find that hard to believe," I retorted. "The spaceport is swimming in money."

HK forwarded on my observation and listened.

"Observation: Bibble is a disturbingly honest politician, Master. He claims the credits supplied by the Senate are specifically for the relief efforts. Diverting them to a criminal organisation to buy back non-essential valuables would be looked upon unfavourably."

A simple snatch and dash job then. I wasn't disinclined, but I was curious as to why he was risking exposing himself to accusations of criminal collusion with someone he'd never met before. "Why I?" I asked in Basic.

HK listened to the answer. "Translation: They claim to have observed you advertising your services as a smuggler, moving large volumes of cargo undetected. Observation: They appear to believe that you somehow smuggled a large volume of food and sold it in openly in an effort to show off your skills. That is a conclusion that only a desperate meatbag could draw, given the data."

I gave Bibble an encouraging smile. "I'll take it as it comes. What's he offering, if there's not much in the way of credits?"

HK and Bibble negotiated briefly. "Answer, the pirate's ship, Master."

I lost what joviality I had. "I will take that for myself with or without his approval."

"Technicality: Under Nabooan law, accused pirates are afforded some legal rights. As the Togruta legally owns the ship, simply taking it would be viewed as piracy on most of the planets we are likely to visit to trade. As the pirates are not Naboo citizens however, the costs associated with their legal defense are offset by impounding and auctioning their ship. Even purchasing such a vessel at auction is beyond your current finances, Master."

"The bounties on the pirates won't help cover it?"

"Negative: Official bounties are notoriously slow to be paid, Master. Bibble is offering the ship to you in a way that would make your ownership impossible for anyone to legally appeal."

I nodded. "So it's a crime for me to take his ship, but not for a government. Nice to see nothing ever changes. All right, let's discuss specifics. How many of these bits and pieces does he want in return for my ship?"

As HK and Bibble negotiated in earnest, I leaned back and watched the bureaucrat's body language. There was no need to let him know that any artifacts I recovered beyond the agreed number would be offered to him at obscene rates. He'd find it probably would have been cheaper to simply let me have my ship in the first place.

* * *

I got the impression that neither Bibble nor Panaka were too interested in dragging out the negotiations. Not only were there no doubt a great many demands on their time, and convincing someone they thought was a smuggler to steal stolen goods probably wasn't part of their usual job descriptions.

Job specifics agreed, I'd requested to be taken to Anakin so that we could leave. Panaka's attitude immediately went even frostier, but he complied, leading HK and I through the palace to a reception room where a group of women sat with my wayward mechanic.

The women were all uniformly dressed in delicate robes, with one exception. It could only be the Queen. No one else but royalty would willingly dress in such a ludicrous manner.

I was quite surprised to discover that the Queen was a teenager. From what Anakin had told us and what HK had pulled from the local holonet about her achievements, I was expecting her to be some sort of muscular Amazonian warrioress. A slender, petite little girl did not fit the vision.

Still, as a scrawny, under-fed lad of twelve I'd managed to slay a basilisk with some allies and a big dose of luck, so who's to say she wasn't a true warrior? I wasn't going to discount her accomplishments.

She certainly carried herself as a warrior. The first words out of her mouth to me had Anakin flushing with shame and anger.

"Translation: The female meatbag wants to know if you have long had the habit of kidnapping helpless children."

I gave her a wry smile and a soft chuckle, not offended in the least. "Tell her not nearly as long as she has condoned slavery."

HK dutifully translated, and I was pleased to see a faint colour rise in her cheeks. Several of the other women shifted uncomfortably; one even looked at me with a murderous expression. The Queen raised her chin and retorted haughtily.

"Verbatim Translation: I have never condoned it, and I resent the implication."

"Sorry, were we not just making shit up about each other?"

"Observation: I had assumed that you wished to leave here without bloodshed, Master. How pleased I am to be proved wrong."

I sighed. "Just translate, HK. This is a verbal dance that people do when they know they've done something bad, or in this case, neglected to do the right thing. She won't admit that leaving Anakin in the Order's custody was wrong, but she knows they treated him poorly and she's angry about it. She'll take that anger out on me. But she's got nothing but righteous indignation to support her views." I paused. "Actually, tell her what I just said. I'm interested in her reaction."

"Observation: May I charge weapons, just in case?"

I waved my hand imperiously. "By all means, but surreptitiously, if you please."

HK spoke for a while, and the Queen's sullen demeanour did not soften in the slightest. She asked a short question.

"Translation: What did you intend to do with the little meatbag?"

I glanced over at Anakin, who had started to look at the Queen with a little less adoration and a little more irritation. "Do with him? He's a member of my crew, nothing more or less. He is as free to leave as he is to stay. He may go wherever and whenever he desires."

HK translated. He got it mostly right from what I could tell; Anakin looked pleased while the Queen looked decidedly less aggressive. She spoke quickly.

"Translation: She demands that you leave the little meatbag here on Naboo with her."

"Demands?" I asked him. "Do you mean, legally or morally?"

"Clarification: There was no justification specified, Master."

I crossed my arms. "Ask her if Anakin is a member of her family, or a citizen of this world."

As HK spoke, I gently sent out a tendril of Legilimency. Her emotions were all over the place; an impressive feat, given her calm demeanour. She truly cared for Anakin, but believed he belonged with the Jedi. Specifically, he belonged with the two who helped rescue her world. She gave HK a long answer.

"Translation: She admits that she has no legal authority over the boy, but insists that he is a part of the Jedi Order."

"Tell her that if she insists on returning him to them then despite her earlier claims, she does in fact condone slavery. Unless she has another definition for forcing an uneducated boy to work for no pay and have no choice in the matter."

That got her to flush hard; it was visible even through the heavy cosmetics. Her response was curt and flat.

"Translation: She claims that kidnapping him from his guardians is a criminal act."

I gave her a lop-sided grin. "Oh good, she's not denying it. Ask her if, legalities aside, it would be moral for me to surrender a child to someone else if that child was going to be sent to be a slave on a farm."

"Observation: Your methods of diplomacy are most satisfactorily unsubtle, Master. Translating now."

As HK offended the Queen even more on my behalf, I gave Anakin a wink. He smiled at me, but it was obvious he still adored the Queen.

"Translation: She denies that the Jedi order practices slavery, though she is noticeably vague on the specific details."

I rose to my feet. "Well, I'm not going to bother arguing with her any more. Tell Anakin – in Huttese – that we're off. If he doesn't want to come, I'll give him his pay and we'll be on our way, no hard feelings. If he wants to come, he's welcome. Coincidentally, we're heading to Tatooine, so we'll probably get the opportunity to go and buy his mother's freedom. What he's earned so far will be more than enough to cover it."

The Queen and her guards were mightily offended as HK's use of Huttese. Anakin listened, but brightened considerably at the end. He responded in kind.

The Queen's entourage objected to the conversation she wasn't involved in, but I ignored them.

"Translation: The little meatbag wants to free his mother. He has decided to come with us."

I grinned and turned my back on the women. Despite the howls of offense at my impertinence, I swaggered out of the reception room with HK at my shoulder. Anakin trotted along behind, calling out over his shoulder at the Queen. They had a short, tight conversation, but Anakin was resolute. He was going to leave with us.

_Chapter 10_

_The Queen was not to be outdone however. By the time a guard had escorted us back to the palace hanger bay, Panaka was waiting at our ship with domed, blue and silver astromech droid and a slouched, bewildered-looking Gungan. He made another demand._

_"Literal Translation: Her Highness insists that someone she trusts accompany Anakin until you return."_

_I glanced at the pair accompanying Panaka. "Which one?" I asked in Basic, wondering if he meant the droid or the Gungan._

o_ooo000ooo_o

AN: Thank you to all my reviewers and readers, for your patience and words both.


End file.
